Party games

A child’s birthday party should be a consummately happy event. But the talented painter Mia Merlin looks at that celebration through the wiser eyes of an adult. Removing nostalgia’s blinders, Merlin’s lovely, bittersweet paintings instead capture the truth of childhood as a mixture of expectation, anxiety, wonder and loneliness.

Drawing from home movies of her own family’s birthday parties, Merlin’s paintings are infused with the colors of timeworn film. The color scheme — faded pinks, beachy corals, Kelly greens, butter yellows — are instantly evocative of a vanished time and place. It’s indebted not only to the seductive palette of old photos and furnishings, but the children themselves, who are all alabaster skin flushed red with excitement or trepidation.

Merlin has clearly done some scrupulous editing of her home movies by stopping the whirl of action for a significant moment of arrested insight into its emotional undertones.

In “Cousin,” children with plates of food before them stare vacantly into the camera, suggesting boredom or diminished expectations or any number of glum moods to counteract the festivities. The work suggests a frank reassessment of childhood itself as an event — like the birthday party — that can often fall short of desired expectations.

The artist’s light-infused paintings, defined by flickering candles or drenched in morning sunshine, offer a stage set for happiness that fretful moments do not deliver. In one of Merlin’s most common scenarios, a child sits at the lip of a vast table, hypnotized by glowing birthday candles, frozen stock still in contemplation. In “Boy in Space,” a child in a sailor suit engages in a rapturous one-on-one with the birthday cake’s glowing lollipop candles. At the edge of painting, his mother’s chin juts into the frame and his daddy’s tanned hand grasps a nearby chair back.

There is the sense of a vast, complicated event rigged to please adults where the children and their isolated reveries become potent asides. The children who are at center stage seem to hover between a solitary self-possession and a sense of being lost in the shuffle.


Birthday Party: Paintings by Mia Merlin runs through July 18 at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery, 980 Briarcliff Road. Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 404-872-5338. <a href-“http://www.callanwolde.org”target=”new”>www.callanwolde.org.