MEL WATKIN DEFIES GRAVITY

COBDEN -- In the 1980s, Mel Watkin enrolled in the University of Montana to become a ceramic sculptor. But something happened on the way to her MFA.

"I kept wanting to defy gravity," Watkin says.

The art Watkin creates now is a near-weightless convergence of lace and paint and pencil. At first the images look like plants and flowers, but her plants do not exist in nature.

"I don't draw from life," she says. "I'm more interested in making up flowers in my head."

These flowers are both delicate and dangerous.

The Cobden artist recently was awarded a $7,000 Artist Fellowship by the Illinois Arts Council. She is one of 42 Illinois artists who will receive fellowships this year in the categories of crafts, ethnic and folk arts, playwriting/screenwriting and visual arts.

"It's a real honor to be selected by a panel of your peers," Watkin says. "I feel extremely lucky that Illinois supports individual artists as much as they do."

Watkin's resume in impressive. Her work has been exhibited nationally, with recent shows at Franklin Furnace in New York, the Newhouse Gallery at Snug Harbor on Staten Island, the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the Addison-Ripley Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Her work is in the collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York and the Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis.

But she also had a show at the Front Street Gallery in downtown Cobden simultaneous with a show in Atlanta.

Watkin spent part of her childhood in Mexico and Guatemala because her father worked for the World Health Organization. She grew up outside Boston and graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1978 before heading for graduate school Missoula, Mont.

There she discovered some of the limitations of clay. "It doesn't like to get really, really big," she says. "And it doesn't like to float in space."

Lace does.

"Lace has a lot of associations with it," she says. "You think of your grandmother."

She puts a layer of white paint on the lace first and then sands it to have something to paint on.

Some of her flowers look "semi-real," she allows.

"I want them to look like they might be able to be (real) and also a little scary."

It is that aspect of nature, the beauty and the beastliness, that intrigues her.

She tells of seeing corn strangled by lovely morning glories. "I was amazed that these beautiful morning glories could kill so easily," she says.

In the spring and summer, the meadow near her house is lovely. But part of the green beauty is due to the poison ivy she is very allergic to.

One wall of her backyard studio is partly covered by a large floral mural and by self-customized maps of Southern Illinois and the region she lived in out West.

Watkin loves maps, "the way they tell us how we're looking at ourselves."

Her "secession map" represents how Southern Illinois would look if it seceded from Illinois proper, a fantasy she likes.

Watkin and her husband, SIU sculpture professor Jerry Monteith, moved to Southern Illinois from Washington, D.C., in 1990. They have very different approaches to art, he being more methodical, she more intuitive. But, she says, "I I don't know how I could be married to anybody who is not an artist."

Beauty, flora and fauna drew them to Cobden.

Natural history intrigues Watkin. Her sketch book filled with drawings of plants and things that may or may not be transferred to lace some day.

Watkin and her husband have a 7-year-old son, Matthew. When she isn't in her studio, she's a volunteer art teacher at Matthew's school. At present the class is making masks out of newspaper and balloons.

After six or seven years of work, Watkin's series of flora and fauna is nearly at an end, always a scary time for an artist.

"Now what am I going to do?" she asks.