David Mellen

Oil on linen: 'Hyena'

2025

David Mellen (b. 1970, Chicago, IL, USA) attended the American Academy of Art and exhibited his work in his hometown of Chicago until 1994, when he moved to Europe. Over the next five years, he exhibited work in Paris, Brussels and London while working at studios in Germany and Brussels. After returning to the states and living for a time on the west coast, he moved across the country and now lives with his family in Connecticut and exhibits in New York. “When I start a new painting, it’s as if I’ve forgotten how to paint. I mean, once a painting is finished, that final image is so separate from the painting’s beginning, which is buried in this history of false starts and mistakes that I’ve forgotten how I went about it. For me, a finished painting is an accumulation of many small decisions which eventually add up to form a final image, but when starting something new, there is no history…there is nothing but a feeling and an idea. There’s a line in Becket’s Endgame ‘There’s something dripping in my head… A heart, a heart in my head.’ That’s how painting feels to me, slowly accumulating drop by drop.”