The world caught fire that day Jack Thursby offered one small piece of advice to young Melissa Fiorentino.
“Make yourself unignorable.”
At the time Thursby said that to the 19-year-old Fiorentino, she was a budding talent searching for a method, an identity, and a conduit to the world of successful artists, generally a path littered with hungry painters and canvases covered in fine but forgettable imagery. The College of Central Florida art professor also told Fiorentino that of “five things that will make a difference as far as audiences go, one is humor and the other is shock value.”
Fiorentino immediately chose the latter, and that has made all the difference in fostering a career that has generated an enormous volume of work that is not only beautiful, colorful and edgy, but also popular and sellable. She made certain her work couldn’t be ignored by first, simply showing up at every event and festival there was, and second, by dedicating much of her work to the human figure – particularly the nude female. She weaved in a fair amount of shock value, especially heightened in a rural, southern town where most art has historically centered around horses, flowers and old boat houses.
Today, Mel Fiorentino’s work is among the most recognizable in these parts, standing out for the sometimes-bizarre color schemes, but also for those female forms blended with a dash of mysticism and cosmic curiosity. There’s also her portraiture of celebrities, mostly entertainers and musicians, faces that exhibit nary a flesh tone while the bright hues and neon shades complement and even add to any existing mood.
“Most people know my stuff because I push it out there so much,” Fiorentino said. “I do feel good about it, because one of the biggest issues with artists is finding their identity with their style.”
She admits to enjoying the “use of crazy colors” and that it helped elevate her portraiture of celebrities from simply realistic depictions to other-dimensional re-creations. Although the images she paints are realistic in terms of their form and lines, the colors create an intentional cognitive dissonance that forces the viewer to slow down and reprocess the image. The colors even tend to externalize emotion rather than depicting physical truth.
Most prolific of her subjects is the late David Bowie, himself a personification of that which forces those watching to reprocess what they are seeing. Fiorentino has painted Bowie over 100 times, thanks to a collector in Massachusetts who was impressed with one of her paintings and commissioned her to do more.
After Bowie passed away in 2016, Fiorentino painted a tribute to him that was bought off her Etsy store from the man in Massachusetts. Later, he commissioned Fiorentino to paint more Bowies from images he would send her.
“No artist turns down commissions,” Fiorentino said. “It was cool because he was sending me all these images and giving me recommendations on which albums to listen to – I went down this rabbit hole that I knew every beat and lyric to every Bowie song.”
It also didn’t hurt that Fiorentino is a bit of a musician herself – her instrument of choice is drums – and that greatly influences who she paints. Among her subjects outside of Bowie are Jimmy Page, Barbra Streisand, Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, Cher, BB King, Tom Petty, Slash, Johnny Cash, Chris Cornell, and others. At the annual Battle of the Brushes held in March at the 8th Avenue Gallery, Fiorentino is often seen tuning out the world while her headphones blast heavy metal.
“I’m usually listening to metal as loud as possible because I’m a metal head. But even though I play drums, whenever I’m jamming out, it’s usually more jazzy or bluesy type stuff. But, I loves me some metal!”
Testing the boundaries of a small town’s sensibilities
As captivating as her celebrity portraitures are, what has made Fiorentino’s greatest splash is her foray into the human figure, particularly the female form. To her, the human body is a work of art in itself and by blending these images with her fantastic color schemes and lithely contorted poses, she captures emotions miles beyond the prurient. She sees her paintings of nudes less a study into some modern voyeurism and more a hearkening back to renaissance traditions.
Along the way, not all have shared her sense of tradition in this facet.
“I used to do the (Friday) Art Walk all the time and I would see people covering their kids’ eyes as they walked by,” Fiorentino said. “I feel like they’re tastefully done.”
She recalls one year in the early days of the Friday Art Walk being told by a nearby gallery owner that she couldn’t put her paintings up there.
“I know there are people who will have issues with it, but I’m going to do what I do. If anything, it’s pushed me to put out more (paintings of nudes). It’s art – there have been figure studies and nude paintings and sculptures since at least the (ancient) Greek times.”
Times change and places evolve, and Ocala is testimony to such concepts. Whereas 15-20 years ago, Fiorentino received much grief for her work, today it seems the scales have balanced quite a bit. The nudes that once prompted adults to cover their children’s eyes are today the pieces that make Mel Fiorentino one of Ocala’s most popular artists.
“I had some people who were saying (at the Art Walk), ‘Oh, man, I was really hoping you’d be out here!’ and ended up buying a bunch of small nudes,” Fiorentino said. “There’s definitely a market for it, people who are looking for that stuff. I just don’t like being policed about it.”
For Fiorentino, it all started one day as a teenager when she gazed upon a photo of Michelangelo’s sculpture Pietà. Up to that point, she had been immersed in sketches as most young artists are want to do. The Pietà changed all that.
“It just stopped me,” Fiorentino said of the photo. “I had all these thoughts going on in my head like, ‘Somebody can sculpt that with their hands? He was a human being; I’m a human being. If he can do that, then I can do that.
“I was probably about 15 and it blew my mind. So, to this day, I have this thing that I’m chasing.”
At that point in high school, Fiorentino began to take on projects more serious than her sketches. The great works of Michelangelo, Caravaggio and William Bouguereau began to influence her work. One can especially see the influence of Bouguereau when drinking in one of Fiorentino’s nudes.
Her painting “Embracing the Fire” with its contorted posture reminds of Bouguereau’s “Le Crepuscule” or “L’Aurore.” The main difference being Fiorentino’s explosive color schemes, but with the emotion all the same.
“The Renaissance, I feel like it’s important to keep those traditions alive. Even though the colors are a lot different than all the traditional colors, I think as long as you have the figure represented the way it should be, you can bring all these other elements into it.”
