Hello, Mel.
‘Blue Moves’ (1984) – Originally created for Playboy magazine, ‘Mother’s Day.’
‘FINDING ORDER FROM CHAOS, BEAUTY WITHIN PAIN, AND HOPE FROM DESPAIR, THE ARTIST MEL ODOM’S CAREER HAS SPANNED SEVERAL OF OUR GENERATION’S MOST TUMULTUOUS CULTURAL DECADES. HIS INNATE ABILITY TO PROCESS, THROUGH HIS WORK, THE EVENTS SURROUNDING HIM AND HIS LIFE ARE VISCERALLY TRANSFORMED INTO A DREAM-LIKE STATE OF BLISS IN HIS ART AND IN HIS CREATION OF MEMORABLE OBJECTS OF DESIRE.’ – Jeff Streeper
‘Hard Stuff’ – Portrait of Joe Morrocco.
CASSIDY ALEXA: What is your morning routine?
MEL ODOM: I get up anywhere between 6 and 8 AM. It depends on how I slept the night before. I make coffee sweetened with chocolate milk and try to watch some SpongeBob Squarepants first thing. I can’t start with the news, it’s just too depressing these days. SpongeBob’s basic optimism helps me get braced for facing the real world. If my husband is here we watch it together and discuss what we’re doing that day and if we’ll see each other that evening. We live in separate apartments on opposite sides of town and sometimes don’t see each other on week-days. I also do my emails to Europe in the morning. Then I go to the gym and workout out for an hour or so, four or five days a week. I need the discipline of the gym.
Red Princess (1980) – Owned by Playboy magazine and drawn for an excerpt from Tom Robbins’ ‘Still Life With Woodpecker.’
CA: What most inspires you to create?
MO: That’s very difficult to pin down. I think frequently it’s a few things happening is a way that connects them somehow. The connections may take a while for me to realize but eventually I’ll say or think something and realize I’ve put them together. Or it could be something or someone so beautiful I feel like I have to do something to respond. It happens all sorts of ways, that’s it’s mystery. I prefer the mystery to having a linear reason. A lot of people ruin a perfectly good mystery by having the need to solve it. I’m very comfortable not knowing how it all works.
CA: How do you move through the times when you do not feel inspired at all?
MO: They can be very difficult times. I like having a passion, a driving project to help keep me focused. I can feel adrift and listless between projects. When it happens you just keep going, you acknowledge it, but you just have to use your brain and understand it will pass. Also, understand that this problem is a rich lady problem, not usually life or death. So many people’s problems are just that serious. It’s not that your creative problem isn’t serious, but probably only to you.
‘The Ayatullah Khomeini’ – Done for TIME magazine.
CA: Coffee, Tea, Both, or Neither?
MO: Coffee with chocolate milk in it, “Choffie”!
‘Madonna’ – Done for ‘ROLLING STONE’ magazine.
CA: What does ‘Art’ mean to you?
MO: It’s a commitment to do something extra with your life, something hopefully that exalts your own present and also leaves a shadow of who you were behind. A lot of people (artists) do this because they’re hopeless at so many other things. But also you get to leave something that someone else might love some day and feel less alone because of. You may accidently create an image that tilts somebody’s life. It’s many things and many ways. You have to find your own way, no one else’s way can be too much of a game plan for yours.
