Marvels, Terrors and Delights

Last Winter Diary, January 2009

The gallery is currently gathering material for a book of the letters Melissa Zink and Eva Brann, a distinguished author and educator at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, exchanged between 2006 and 2009. Going through the artist’s papers recently, I came across the following. It’s not from a letter but rather from the short address she delivered upon receiving the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts, in Santa Fe in 2001. It’s a moving statement that reminded me what an extraordinary artist she was, and how blessed I am to represent her work.
     “To the observer, mine appears an ordinary enough existence with little to distinguish it from uncountable others. But an observer cannot know the journeys I’ve made, the lives I’ve lived, the intensities of joy and anguish I have experienced. Nor can that observer know how the everyday complexity of life shines with unfathomable beauty or how the difficulty of expressing that experience becomes overwhelming. That same observer has no way of knowing that I have found permanent shelter in a world constructed from the experience of words and pictures, a world full of marvels, terrors and delights that becomes more real from one day to the next. A world I hope to vanish into someday.”

Melissa Zink, 2007

Melissa died in July, 2009. We miss her terribly but count ourselves among the lucky ones who glimpsed the richness of her interior world, the world into which she peacefully vanished.