1514102226Melvin Edward Nelson19081992Melvin 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). MelvinNelsonhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/8611/fullKnown 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).(1908–1992)ColtonColtonColtonM. E. N.Mighty Eternal NationMelvin Edward Nelson