“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard
Mel works from her studio at Wimbledon Art Studios, a collective of over 150 artists housed in an industrial estate in South West London.
She is largely self-taught, but since 2015 has attended various group classes, both in person and on-line, including at the Heatherley School of Art; Penn School of Art; Winslow Art Centre and the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. She reads widely and and loves that art provides her with an arena where there will always be technical skills to master and new worlds to explore: there will never come a time when she will be able to say “I have learned it all”.
Background
After university, despite a craft-packed childhood and a love of art at school, Mel chose a career which she felt would provide her with financial stability. She began climbing the ladder as a management consultant, initially enjoying the challenging work, the buzz and the overseas travel. But after a while she realised the toxic environment was making her unhappy, and what she really needed to do was create – tangible ‘somethings’ out of nothing, which she could bring into the world all by herself; meaningful ‘somethings’ which she could see through from start to finish. She left the corporate world and took on freelance work which she found interesting: working at a charity providing breakfasts to hungry schoolchildren; writing publications for Sustain, the food sustainability organisation; teaching people to cook without recipes (once she figured out how to do that for herself). And then, when children came along, she devoted a significant chunk of the working week to looking after them.
In 2015, she ‘gave herself permission’ to reconnect with a side of herself which had been lying dormant and took up weekly painting classes. She painted her first still-life in oils at the tender age of 43, and thought to herself, “why didn’t I do this years ago”? A fan of writer Annie Dillard (“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”), she resolved to spend some minutes every day painting. Minutes turned into hours and then, during the pandemic, hours turned into whole days. Lockdown gave Mel the opportunity to turn her hobby into a career. She was able to build up a body of work, which, once things returned to normal, she managed to sell at a local art fair. She decided to make more paintings, taking the approach that, all the while her work was selling, she would continue as a full-time artist. She hasn’t looked back.
Mel lives in Wimbledon with her husband and two teenage daughters. She painted from a small studio in her garden prior to taking a studio at Wimbledon Art Studios in August 2023.