Melany Md

Drawing was a coping mechanism and a way for me to communicate when I was a child. My family moved to the USA from Caracas, Venezual when I was still in diapers. I had already been facing the challenges if isolation and a speech impediment that made it very difficult to speak, a bad stutter that last until I was 12. I had attended several different schools before junior high so drawing student’s portraits became a way for me to self sooth and make friends. Painting and drawing in the figurative has been my practice, with an emphasis in portraiture, since I was is middle school. Grad school was when I allowed myself to expand my thoughts and focus on surrealism. This was where I created layers of depth through symbolism and rendering. From my experience in design and advertsing, I use photoshop to build my reference. It starts out as a drawing, a thought, then photos are taken and layers of images are used to create the reference. Paintings share a balance of the knowledge of form and light through memory along with having the actual visual reference to capture detail. I can always tell if something is painted from imagination and memory versus having the image from life or camera. For surealism to exist, one must have a balance of imaginative form and reality for something to be convincingly perplexing. I graduated with a BFA in Advertising Design from Otis College but changed my course to painting around 2010. I had always wanted to make painting and drawing my focus but of course I had a mother that had different plans for me so finally getting into a field where I had always felt I belonged was everything. After advertising and freelance design work, I changed my path and worked part time as a kids’ art instructor at Paint:Lab and tattoo artist. Becoming a single mother added to the grit and grind but, regardless of life’s challenges, I earned my MFA and moved to Long Beach shortly after where I worked at a tattoo shop and was also engaged with painting murals and teaching for Painting and Vino, where I met with groups of adults at various restaurant venues in Los Angeles and Long Beach and guided them through paintings I had done for beginner level painters. Surprisingly, 2020, during Covid, became my busiest time. Tattooing and teaching may have had slowed down but my mural game kicked up. I was commissioned to paint a few Kobe murals and from there, many more memorials. This led to more recognition and work. I was humbled by my experiences in the streets of Los Angeles painting murals. People would walk by and offer me food, shirts, hats even sunglasses. I spoke with people who were homeless, struggling, who still had it in them to make me smile with compliments. I made friends on the streets and gained respect as an artist. Recently within the past few years, I expanded my reach to the book world and published my first book last year. It’s a book I wrote for parents to read to their child for bed time, who may be facing separation challenges with co parenting, personifying planets revolving around their son, the light of their worlds, titled Space Love Fire Child. I’m currently working on my 2nd book. Reading books to childen is important because they offer a voice for many who may not always have the words themselves. It also offers a time and space to immerse into a story. It may also open up discussions between parent and child. Now that my son is older and over bed time stories, it’s become something nostalgic for me. Art books have the ability to reach a broader audience and my aim is to do for others what art had always done for me: to sooth and inspire. Art has always helped me cope with this life.