Visitors to the Hoxie Gallery in downtown Westerly during the month of April may be pleasantly surprised by the volume and diversity of the artwork on exhibit. Oil paint, pastels, watercolors, pens and ink, acrylics, encaustic, and even spray-paint were used in the creation of the more than 140 pieces of work that range from landscapes and seascapes to geometric abstracts and still lifes. Yet perhaps what’s most surprising is this diverse show is just a portion of the collective work of one man, 77-year-old Ledyard resident John W. Malenda.
Malenda’s exhibit, deemed one of the largest single-artist shows the Hoxie has ever hosted, is a direct reflection of the person behind the paintings. Malenda is the first to recognize his need to continuously change and grow.
“I enjoy painting in varied styles and several different media,” Malenda said. “With some artists you can recognize their work from a mile away because it’s all so similar. I don’t want that to be the case with my work. Each of my paintings is a new and unique creation. I never want to do the same thing twice.”
Looking around the gallery, the plethora of themes in Malenda’s work is symbolic of his own diversified interests. From the tantalizingly beautiful scenes of thick, tropical Jamaican jungles, rolling down to meet the white sands and turquoise water of Montego Bay, to the hard lines and repetitive shapes of an abstract city, Malenda’s skill in accomplishing his varied subjects dates back to his first days of painting in 1952.
While in the Navy and stationed in Hawaii, Malenda couldn’t resist the lush forests and gorgeous coastline of Oahu. He painted his first piece while sitting on the beach and using a Campbell’s soup box as an easel. Malenda later attended the University of New Hampshire where he began studying physics and engineering. Yet his love for painting was still very much a part of him. During his later years in school, Malenda found an opportunity to once again release his creative energy.
“At the University of New Hampshire I majored in physics, but at this place you have to take one non-technical elective so that you keep your head on straight and be connected with society, otherwise you’d get too far out,” Malenda said, laughing. “I decided to take an art course and I knew I liked painting landscapes, so I told the head of the art department, ‘I want to paint landscapes,’ but he said, ‘Well, you don’t start off with a painting course in the art department, you start off with graphics or with drawing.’”
Malenda said he pleaded his case and wound up showing some of his previous work to the art department, which then allowed him to take a painting course. Wanting to paint landscapes, Malenda was in for a rude surprise when his teacher, John Laurent, directed his focus toward abstracts instead.
“I told him I didn’t want to [paint abstracts],” Malenda said. “But he said, ‘I wasn’t asking you. This is my course and if you want to fail it that’s up to you.’ So I moved my easel over to the window and I put the most garish colors I could put into a painting. It was the view from the window of the art department of the powerhouse across the way, and there was a tree in the yard and a staircase to the right and cars in the parking lot, and I was just being nasty. But he really liked it and he put it in the student art exhibit. So I continued to do some abstract art after that.”
After graduating Malenda went on to pursue a career at NASA as a physicist at the Langley research center in Virginia, focusing on magnetofluidynamics as it is applied to space propulsion and upper atmosphere physics. Keen on boating and scuba diving, Malenda and his wife, Melva, purchased the Masons Island Marina in Mystic in the early ’70s and the Williams Cove Boatyard, also in Mystic, shortly thereafter before selling them both in 1986. Malenda even found the time to put in enough hours to earn his Private Pilot’s certificate. Yet throughout the years and numerous ventures, Malenda’s art and family have been the common thread.
While vacationing in Jamaica in the ’90s, Malenda met acclaimed artist Leonard E. Wren, with whom he has since worked in four, private week-long sessions. Malenda also studied for years under world-renowned painter Foster Caddell. But as accomplished as Malenda’s art training might be, he’s the first to admit that he never expected to find himself painting for a living.
“I had never considered doing this for a living until about three years ago,” Malenda said. “I got into a gallery, the Courtyard Gallery in Mystic, and I was the second person in there. The piece I put in sold, and I said, ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad,’ and I’ve sold quite a bit since then. So I look at myself now as a professional painter, at least for the last couple of years…One of the painters I know says something that I really agree with: If you’re going to paint, you better paint really poorly or really well, because there’s no market for the stuff in the middle. Nobody wants a mediocre painting, so you have to be really good or really bad, and I think I’ve seen a lot of both of those. And some of the stuff that’s really bad is actually selling, because it’s so nebulous, so sloppy, that you can interpret it any way you want.”
While painting, Malenda employs a seemingly inexhaustible number of techniques to achieve the desired look. Many of his Jamaican scenes are painted in acrylic and watercolor to properly convey the transparency of the water and the brightness of the sun. When painting local scenes, such as Patchaug State Park in Voluntown, Malenda prefers thick oils or heavy acrylics to mimic the dense brush and heavily leaved trees in the area.
And while landscapes and seascapes are still his favorite subjects, Malenda admittedly loves to experiment.
“This is right out of the tube,” he said, pointing to a colorful and busy abstract of fall foliage. “I was trying to be as loose as I could—I’m a tight painter. I have the tendency to paint very, very tightly, and that’s the engineering background in me. But here I just squeezed paint out of the tube and wham, just put it on there, just pure color out of the tube. And surprisingly a lot of people really like it. It’s not what I’d consider to be a polished painting, but it has an impact because it’s so vibrant.”
Aside from his abstracts and detailed landscapes, some of Malenda’s paintings represent his inner mathematician more than his inner artist.
“This is the most complex painting in the show, and it looks the simplest,” Malenda said, gesturing to a medium-sized painting of kites against a blue sky. “If you’ve read The DaVinci Code you know that the Fibonacci series starts with zero and one, and you add these and the next number is one, you add these two and you get two, you add the next two and you have three, and if you carry this to the limit, the ratio of two consecutive numbers gives you pi…DaVinci would pick four points, four possible points for the center of interest on a painting.
“These four kites here are the four points, the golden mean, right there. These kites here on the outside of the four focal points are half of the golden mean, and these two are a quarter. Starting with the smallest kite here, each kite gets progressively larger by pi. The tail of each kite is the same length as the kite and they are complementary colors…I have 10 kites here, and there are two magic numbers, seven and 13—seven is good, 13 is bad—and I went halfway between the two with 10, which shows balance...So this is a very complex painting, but you might not realize it just by looking at it. More work went into the calculations than the painting.”
Admittedly coming into his own in the last few years, Malenda says his painting is actually gaining momentum, with the last six months or so being the busiest period of painting in his life. He has created more pieces in that span than in any other previous two- or three-year period. And with his passion for art still strong, Malenda feels that he’ll continue to intensify his output.
“I’m 77 years old now, so I don’t have a whole lot of time left, you know?” Malenda said, smiling. “And I want to continue progressing, so I’ve been telling myself that I need to get more stuff up on the wall, but I need to start selling some, too. I don’t want my kids to wind up saying, ‘Oh God, we’re going to have to have one heck of a yard sale.’ But I do have something in mind for another landscape...I want to get some stones into my stuff—they’re very interesting subjects and I haven’t explored them enough yet.”
With such non-relenting interests and the constant need to explore new ideas, styles, and subject matter, Malenda’s artistic journey seems far from over.
Malenda’s artwork can be viewed at the Hoxie Gallery in downtown Westerly through Friday, April 25, or online at Johns-art.blogspot.com.