The future is chlorific. 

Viridescent. Aquamanifest. 

Yes, those are new words. And in the future we are going to need a lot more, because nature is just warming up. Our dreary, old, over-defined ones are just not up to what our dramatically different world will need. It is not just our relationship to heat that’s changing. To generosity. Kindness. Greed. Plenty. Balance. Need. Want.

And most certainly art. As resources are dwindling and demands rise, art will be scrutinized more and more for its relevance and extravagance. At the moment, whatever its politics, the world of contemporary art doesn’t exactly have a teensy carbon footprint. 

So how does one produce when one is trying to reduce? One might deduce that one must induce some way to transduce one into the other. But to seduce others into reproducing the behavior, one must introduce a new word as adducement. We need new words. 

A neat illustration of this quandary can be seen in the paintings, drawings and doings of Haley Mellin, a northern California polymath. An active wilderness conservationist with her own ingenious art-driven fundraising initiative, arttoacres.org, Mellin is also an artist whose nature-focused works are unapologetic about embracing the human need to create things.  

“When I work on conservation projects, I often think how funny it is that our goal for the land is to continue just as it is,” says Mellin. “Not too many jobs have no change as the ideal outcome.”

With such seeming synergy, one might be tempted to look at Mellin’s paintings as merely an aesthetic extension of her nature trek. But for her, painting is in many wonderful ways the polar opposite of conservation work, which is often a lengthy, complicated function of engagement with people, politics and outcomes. 

When she is painting, the outcome is hers immediately. She can decide whether she is painting soothingly with gouache (her preferred medium these days) or scratching out starker images with charcoal. Similarly, she can paint vague impressions of cloud forests that bring to mind the messy impressionism of Joseph Turner or photorealist perfections of Andreas Gursky. She has the wheel.

And yet, she doesn’t. Avoiding the crushing historical canon of landscape painting, which despite its hundreds of guises almost always aims to capture the land even when trying merely to reflect it, Mellin treks into the woods (she has worked throughout the Americas) and picks a spot. She then tries to redefine the relationship between artist and subject, making it a system of observation, of sensory input (through her eyes and ears and nose and body) back through muscles and sensory outputs (through the eyes, through the hands).

So while in some ways the land and the atmosphere still dictate what Mellin’s art looks like, Mellin sees the works as records (albeit very attractive ones) of the experiences she had making them, rather than traditional artworks. Ultimately, this makes them a testament to the feat of feeling and relishing all our senses. By some counts we have dozens of different senses, and Mellin’s art can be seen as a kind of valentine to one of the most under-appreciated—balance. 

Ironically, this careful and meditative incarnation of balance—of input and output, of being and doing—harkens back to the zen ideal she has for conserving land. But no matter the medium, watercolor or wetlands, change is constant and constancy changes. We don’t have words for conflicting ideas like this, and we need them soon. Maybe someday, when discussing art that manages to thoughtfully balance a host of desires and contradictions, we will call it mellinistic. 

– David Colman


Haley Mellin was born in the Bay Area, California. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, a Ph.D. from New York University and participated in the Whitney Museum ISP. The artists rosenclaire are longstanding mentors.

Mellin’s recent solo and group exhibitions include “Take Care Project” at Fondazione 107 in Torino, Italy (2021); “Bananas” at Fort Makers in New York, New York (2021); “Hudson House: Phase 2" curated by Jesse Jag at Hudson House in Hudson, New York (2021); “Real Estate,” curated by Adam Marnie at F in Houston, Texas (2020); “Animal Kingdom” at Alexander Berggruen in New York, New York (2020); “Online Exhibition: Drawn Together" at Unit Gallery in London, United Kingdom (2020); “Week 10” at The Tennis Elbow Window in New York, New York (2020); “The Fine Art Quarantine Coloring Book” curated online by Brooke Wise (2020); “King Dogs Never Grow Old” at Diane Rosenstein in Los Angeles, California (2020); “King Dogs Never Grow Old” at Diane Rosenstein in Los Angeles, California (2020); “Shoulder” at Shoulder Gallery in Los Angeles, California (2018); “Warhol & Mellin” at Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles, California (2018); “Hot Mud" at JAG Projects, Spook Rock Farm in Hudson, New York (2017); “Zine Tornado” at MoMA Ps1 in Queens, New York (2016); “Haley Mellin” at Bischoff Projects in Frankfurt, Germany (2016).

Mellin founded the Art into Acres non-profit in 2017 to support permanent land conservation on behalf of artists. As a part of her collaborative climate and ecological activism, Mellin co-founded Conserve in New York (2017); the MOCA Environmental Council in Los Angeles (2020); Art and Climate Action in San Francisco (2020); and Artists Commit in New York (2020). She will be the Max Beckmann Distinguished Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Berlin (2023).

Haley Mellin lives and works in Fairfax, California and Union City, New Jersey.