Melvin Edward Nelson
(1908–1992)
BornMichigan, United States
ActiveColton, Oregon, United States
BiographyMelvin Edward Nelson—who signed his name on his work as M.E.N. (Mighty Eternal Nation)—made art to transmit his visions of planetary and cosmic phenomena. These drawings, often created in series, record the artist’s scientific approach to the metaphysical. For instance, Octopus comprises twelve drawings responding to the 1964 Great Alaska earthquake, the most powerful recorded earthquake to hit North America. A biomorphic form ominously appears and then encircles Earth with its tentacles; Nelson writes on the final scene, “Greater earthquakes are still to come. Greater than the world has ever seen since the creation of time. Outer space is layed [sic] out like a mess of cobwebs and you see it as such. At another perspective angle you see space as round circles, layer on layer.”Each drawing was inscribed with the date and time it was made. Although some of the soft hues in his art came from watercolors, he would also grind pigments from rocks and soil that he collected at night from what he believed were UFO landing sites. This earthy material gave his work an extra level of connection to terrestrial energy as he created celestial landscapes and abstract pictograms with which he attempted to visualize the unknowns of the world and beyond.
Nelson was born in 1908 in Michigan and later moved west to Portland, Oregon. Starting around the 1950s, he lived mostly in isolation on a hilltop farm in Colton, Oregon, a rural community in the Mount Hood foothills. He used the space to experiment with his electronic inventions, such as a “cyclotronic generator” for levitation and an “anyzager” for astral projection. In the 1960s, he began to create small paintings reflecting on the connections between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of its atomic structures. He was inspired by both pop culture and the spiritual, and he pored over issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science as well as theosophy tracts. As he once stated of his work, “These pictures are of the worlds of Tomorrow, with the design and creation of the mightiest of atoms.”
Nelson died in 1992; his farm and its contents were sold after they were acquired by a real estate investor. Although he never shared his otherworldly work with the public, the notebooks he left behind reveal his process of making art to express the cosmic from the materials under his feet.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).