Known by the acronym M.E.N. (Mighty Eternal Nation), Melvin Edward Nelson created in a relatively reclusive mode from his hilltop seventy-acre farm in Colton, Oregon. In addition to using watercolors, he painted with handmade pigments from crushed soil and rock samples dug up on his property, mixed with water. This material, in his view, was impacted by the energy of electromagnetic fields. The marks formed on the surface of a specific artwork are, in his words, “caused by the tremendous force of the speed of the planetary atom burning its imprint into the surface of the Earth.” In that regard, Nelson’s artistic practice stood as a blueprint of invisible phenomena, as he incidentally became the witness of a “pulsing world” with its impalpable dynamics. Nelson was familiar with edgier spiritual practices. Magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science were bible, along with theosophy tracts and science fiction magazines. He approached the metaphysical with a scientific manner.
Nelson tended to work in series, developing themes from one page to the next. He meticulously marked each drawing with the date and time of its execution. One of these groups, referred to as the “Octopus” series, is composed of twelve drawings created before, during, and after the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. history—the Great Alaska earthquake of magnitude 9.2, on March 27, 1964, at 5:36 pm local time. Nelson must have seen the earthquake coming, transcribing the sequential development of the disaster as it was forming. The first drawing of the series was executed on June 24, 1963, when Nelson recorded a “whirl” in space. On its back is written: “The planetary band and all that is in it is God’s great mighty and beautiful crown. The vast eternity of space is his body. The World below is his footstool. The World in its Whirl and its actions is his desire.”
A phrase on the back of the work created on March 27, at 4:31 pm, says that the many feelers of the Octopus “are extending millions of miles out into space. He [the octopus] was laying very quiet. All at once his body gave a twitch, then the spinning world below started to whirl very fast. . . . My god, how the earth shudders and shakes it is almost breaking up. Now he is releasing his hold. Now you can see the huge crack in the earth where he fractured it with his mighty squeeze. It is coming from the east across the top of the world and makes a turn and comes down the coast of North America. . . . With this mineral and my process there will be nothing impossible with man on earth.”
Observations about his acute connection to the living space sur- rounding him are also found in scrapbooks. On September 1, 1963, he wrote, with his typical modus operandi: “I am always driving ahead into the future I am the present.”
Valérie Rousseau, “Melvin Edward Nelson. Tracking the World in Its Whirl,” in Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic, ed. Valérie Rousseau (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2018).
