About Melvyn Poore

Melvyn Poore (born in Hampshire, UK) is a visual artist and musician based in Lübeck, Germany. Since 2016 he has returned intensively to painting and, from 2018, to programming digital images, developing a body of work that folds musical thinking — form, rhythm, variation — back into visual composition. His analog works are grounded in spontaneous, improvisatory action, where gestures, overlays, and erasures build up a surface until a visual balance asserts itself. His digital practice explores layering and the role of chance through randomized parameters — line length and thickness, colour, transparency, placement, and clustering — testing how optical density shapes perception and how multiple visual logics can coexist in the same pictorial space. The dialogue between analog and digital methods drives a practice that is at once process-led and rigorously shaped by constraint. He continues to exhibit and develop new series across media, and his work can be found at mp‑art.eu.

This visual practice has deep roots. Poore studied at the University of Birmingham, earning a BA (Hons) and MA (1972–76), before becoming Music Director of the Birmingham Art Laboratory (1976–79) — an interdisciplinary environment where art, music, and community practice were inseparable. There he co-founded Arts Lab Publishing and began the pedagogical experiments that later grew into the projects spielBar and everyDayArt, both of which place participatory making at their centre.

His parallel career as a musician and performer spans several decades and has consistently crossed into theatre, choreography, and visual spectacle. Highlights include co-creating an evening of John Cage music-theatre with choreographer Reinhild Hoffmann (1996); a decade with the noise band Zeitkratzer (1997–2007), including instrumental performances of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (2001); large-scale productions of Stockhausen's Michael's Reise (2008) and Sonntag aus Licht (2011); Harry Partch's Delusion of the Fury with Musikfabrik and Ruhrtriennale (2016); the video project Four6 (2021); and Simon Steen-Andersen's Transit (2023). From 1988 to 1991 he held a research fellowship at Salford focusing on real-time performance for tuba and live electronics, and from 1993 he spent nearly three decades with Ensemble Musikfabrik (Cologne), contributing to repertoire development, stage work, community engagement, and academy initiatives. In 1977 he was a prizewinner at the Gaudeamus Competition for Interpreters of New Music, subsequently touring as a soloist across Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Poore lives and works in Lübeck, Germany.

I work in the analog and digital domains, making pictures which feed from the experience of both areas. Underlying much of my present work is an exploration of layering which - in analogue painting - is a centuries-old technique. In the digital domain, it is 'second-nature' and much more free, since it fits the structure of the medium so well and one can build in interactions between the layers.

In order to bring about surprises and challenges in my digital work I use the wide field of random functions. When something non-intentional occurs, it is subsumed into the work. It requires a change of direction, responding to new input. This is an important part of my working process - and my everday life!

So - often - I do not know how a work will turn out, but sometimes I do envisage a picture - or part of it - in advance. I hone my learning process by setting myself specific problems, which inevitably turn into a series of solutions. Take a theme and subject it to many variations. I have a number of ongoing series which are in different collections in my gallery (https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/mp-art).

Whilst setting myself technical exercises, I discovered a fascination with the physical materials and the processes that I use to make marks on a surface. There are so many factors involved: color, viscosity, transparency, fluidity of the paint; length, thickness, profile, flexibility and speed of the brush; size and qualities of the painting surface; the source and range of light; the position of my body in relation to the surface. All of these have been investigated by many artists, long ago, but the materials keep changing as our technology changes; there are always new things to find out and unrealised pictures to discover. There are always old habits to identify, whose absence would make my way free again. This is all part of my inward journeying, to explore relationships between all those factors mentioned above - and more! I experience these areas expanding all the time - which is, of course, only another way to say that I am developing the ability to see and use them. This is a Reason To Do Art!

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