About

Melody Brown,
Artist Statement-Works in Oil

INTERACTIVE EXPRESSIONIST

Born in one of Georgia O’ Keefe’s summer retreats, Lake George, New York, Melody Brown started painting very early on as a child. Melody’s artistic abilities were encouraged and fostered by her mother, who provided Melody with private lessons from many renowned local artists. In the beginning, Melody used models and pictures to render her images; but often she created landscapes from her imagination using very unusual color palettes. This unique style of Melody’s stood out so much that even as a child she starting winning many awards.

Melody’s desire to depart from the norm, continued to fuel amazing inventive creations during her college years at St. Lawrence University, in Canton New York. In her college exhibition, Melody’s abstract landscapes were so wonderful that one of her oil paintings received the Grand Prize Award. A few years later Melody moved to California where she continued her studies of different art mediums at El Camino College and Cal State Long Beach.

After Melody finished school, she put away her paintbrush and began to work in the fields of sociology, education and business. While in California, Melody married and raised three children as well as operated a Santa Monica based business on the beach known as Perry’s Café and rentals.

Years later Melody returned to painting while she dabbled in many art mediums that included jewelry making, printmaking, and watercolor throughout the years, it was in 1999 that she finally returned to doing what she was best at: her oil paintings. Melody’s love of oils with brilliant colors and exotic interpretations of images were soon to become her trademark.

Melody Brown has flavors of Gaugin, Picasso, Rivers, Kahalo, and O’Keefe. Her vast travels and introduction to ancient indigenous cultures has been her inspiration. She has rhythm, passion, and sensuality that dominates her style as she paints people from all cultures. Her paintings often have multiplicity and complicity of images sometimes fooling the observer at first glance. She always continues to stretch her imagination for all to experience in her paintings.

Melody Brown is an Interactive Expressionist, a term she has given her process of creating unique works in oils while consciously avoiding repetitive images and style. Her process allows for an array of eclectic images to include the political, social, spiritual and whimsical. She creates from a school of thought known as Fluidicism, painting without aids or pictures and accessing the subconscious to express visuals of past, present, and future events. She is a raw intuitive process painter. Her colorful images incorporate elements of energy, rhythm, and dance.

“FLUIDICISM” – Freedom with Loving Union Invokes Daring the Inevitable to Converge Ingenuity with the Subconscious Mind.

Her process is mostly self-taught. It involves self-exploration and discovery to create a unique expression of varied concepts of landscapes, figures, and abstractions that emerge while excavating her images. Form and image emerge through her process without initial conscious thought and direction. Images unfold while manipulating the paint. Once the direction becomes obvious, Melody skillfully and uniquely paints into it. She excavates her images sculpting with the palette knife and later finessing through her eyes with the brush. Each piece evolves over different periods of time and some can take a few years to perfect. Some works have 2 or 3 paintings underneath in the process of resolving the concept. Each piece has a life of its own and would take her away from her process to duplicate.

In her most recent transition, Melody Brown connects soulful reflection with external events through intuitive approach through ethnic and figurative images to impressionistic imaginary landscapes and finally abstract expressionism. Threads of color, symmetry, movement and balance are combined with spontaneous expression and the element of surprise. There is no preconceived design or subject, but a working of the paint with tile trowels and palette knives, a struggling through the process, visually accessing and adjusting allowing the paint and intuition to take over as the image progresses. Her application of over lapping layers of thin and thick amounts of paint is a specific trait of a typical Melody Brown painting. Melody’s intention is to spontaneously create works that engage the viewers, who, in turn, decipher the meaning through their own eyes and perceptions. The suggestive and the obvious elements interplay on canvas as a dance waiting to erupt in discovery.

Melody Brown currently lives in Hermosa Beach and continues to paint in her free time as a way to maintain peace and tranquility in her life.