Artist explores contrasts on museum wall in 'act of drawing'
By Daniel Silliman
PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
PORT ANGELES -- The artist’s notebook was sprawled open at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center Thursday, white pages open on the top of a piled stack of art books.

Spokane artists Melissa Lang’s neat printed writing and loose lines of drawing cross the blue grid of the book.

A loosely drawn bird, inked in black circles, perches on the thin line of a forked twig on the right side of the page. His head, cocked curiously, looks toward a list of the artists appointments to draw for children.

A phone number scrawled out upside down formed the ground beneath the bird.

Lang, an emerging Spokane artist working in residency on a mural beginning Thursday and lasting two weeks, stood against a large white wall in the Fine Arts Center.

Her hair was bound up in a red handkerchief, her denim jeans rolled up to her knees, the charcoal she was working with smudged across her jaw.

With a stick of charcoal in her hand, Lang gestured at the upper right corner of the wall, the emerging piece of art.

“I love the contrast between the delicacy of the lines and the dark foreboding,” she said.

She moves an outstretched hand in an arch. The charcoal scratched across the wall, leaving black and gray lines in a descending vine with tailing leaves.

Read the rest of my story of a charcol smudged postmodernist artist...