Featured Artist
There are many talented individuals within our community, and this page is dedicated to shining light on their Art.
Melody Cleary
I convey, through my art, my emotional response to color, texture and design in nature.
Artist Biography
The visual arts have held great appeal to me since grade school. I watched my father who was very skilled at drawing and, at home, would draw a variety of designs for granite & marble memorials during his long engraving career in Portland. As he worked, I doodled & drew. In the 70’s I studied drawing and oil painting with local professional artists at Art Center West in Tigard OR, now long gone, and as a working adult, wife and mother, I moonlighted by taking classes at community college and local art schools in life drawing, oil painting, palette knife painting, watercolor, acrylic and a year of basic design. Since retirement in 2000, my concentration has been on continued media and color exploration, dabbling in watercolors, but finding the most intrigue with acrylics and collage. Nature is a great inspiration to me and I take reference photos in and around the Willamette Valley which inspire my paintings.
Since 2005, my work has been juried into Watercolor Society shows, Beaverton’s Visual Showcase, the former Kingstad Gallery in Beaverton, juried online exhibitions of the Int’l Society of Acrylic Painters, & Sequim Arts exhibition in Washington. I have participated in the Waterlily Festival at Hughes Water Gardens in Tualatin. Two works are in the permanent collection of City Hall in Beaverton. I have had two solo shows – in 2008 at the American Red Cross in Portland and in 2010 at Elsinore Framing & Fine Art Gallery in Salem.
Artist Statement
I convey, through my art, my emotional response to color, texture and design in nature. I am usually inspired by my own photos taken at local areas, zooming in on a particular portion of the scene where I find a pleasing composition & design. On the computer, I might convert the photo to black & white to just see values, and blur it (instead of squinting), then let my intuition guide the colors I employ, trying to remain as free as possible with the paint application via fluid negative brush painting or bold palette knife strokes, always conscious of the of lights against darks…I am so drawn to light and shadows. Water patterns and reflections are of particular interest to me lately due to the wonderful abstraction that is created. And I am deriving great pleasure from applying and scraping pigment with knives to achieve interesting texture and tones … I am using thicker paint now. Although I am predominantly a landscape and nature painter, I also enjoy experimenting with collage and acrylic stained papers.
Artwork
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