Masters of Intrigue
- maecrawford
- Aug 16
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 30
When we were kids, my older sister had a poster in her room of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, with its massive, melting pocket watches laying limp beneath the cliffs of Catalonia. I loved that surrealist style: quirky and absurd, dreamlike yet still grounded in real life.
I grew up in Louisiana, home of the Mardi Gras festival, famous for its royal gowns and mystical masks. I began wondering what would happen if I combined the surrealism of Dalí with the offbeat grandiosity of Mardi Gras and its masks.
I decided to find out.
My thought was: If you’re going to do grandiloquent, go big. So instead of buying a canvas from the local art store, I went to Home Depot and picked up particle boards — 2’ x 4’ slabs of wood, bigger than a Great Dane, slightly smaller than a horse. And I began to paint.
I love creating paintings that grab your attention — and reward you the longer you look at them. The surrealism in this series comes from the questions that you, the viewer, would only think to ask after gazing at the paintings for a few minutes.
Questions like: “Wait, why are there no people behind these masks?” and “Are these ball gowns simply … floating in space?”
A professor of mine in college used to ask us, “Why paint? Why would you choose to express this vision in paint?”
I realized that to capture the magic and ceremonial elegance of these Masters of Intrigue, there was no reason to limit the works to paint alone. So I crafted a collection of diamond-shaped mirrors and glued them onto the masks and gowns.
Adorned with mirrors, the masks began moving, the gowns shifting and sparkling based on where the viewers stood and how the lighting in the room changed.
One piece from the Masters series was later featured at East End Studios in Houston, as part of a larger tribute to Tim Burton, director of many gothic masterpieces like Edward Scissorhands and the original Batman film.
Other Masters paintings were displayed at Festival International de Louisiane, the famous five-day festival in Lafayette, Louisiana, celebrating Francophone culture. Admittedly, the festival attendees who viewed my paintings looked a bit baffled by this strange blend of mirrors and paint. But I look back at this series with great affection.
When you’re painting, you never quite know what’s going to happen. After all, you’re really just pushing pigment around. Sometimes the pigment doesn’t do what you want, and all you can do is wait for it to dry so you can paint over it.
Other times, like with the Masters of Intrigue, I can look back with a mix of joy and surprise, and say to myself, “Yes. What I had in my head — it actually happened here.”
Visit www.melissamaekors.com or email me at melissamae@melissamaekors.com
and let me know which paintings you want to hear about in my next eblast.
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