Mark making, drips, layers, scumbling, contradicting, and abstracting, artist Melanie Crawford wrestles with the materiality of abstract painting, reinvigorating the medium with new references and perspectives. In her Adelaide studio, she works improvisationally to build, scrape and layer the paint applied to the canvas in an ongoing process of editing and revision. Her art is about connection and her finished artworks are the surface remains of many conversations, moments, sounds, movements and expressions which therefore become a kind of universal language. She states, “It’s a non-linguistic activity that in many ways cannot be contained by language alone.”
Graduating from UNSW College of Fine Arts in Sydney in 2013, Crawford seeks to apply the experimental and improvisational practices of the Abstract expressionist painters of the modern era to the realm of contemporary painting. Her broad span of artistic references extends to Lee Krasner, Yvonne Audette, Jahnne Pasco White and Anna Schuleit-Haber.
For Melanie, art is about connection, an expression of the journey of life and the offering of a higher understanding of communication. She is always curious and experimenting, yet finds her process to be the most integral part of her artmaking. Layers, thick texture, drips, colours, welcomed mistakes and the travelling of paint build the story of her paintings. Melanie's process reveals, conceals, and re-examines what we define as beauty like collecting evidence of life lived over time; the peeling of paint on walls and the hidden potential residing in discarded remnants. She is fascinated by the beauty found in organic marks made naturally without overthinking or correcting.
She writes "I have had the privilege of a life of creativity, an amazing art education and the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. I have learned that life is complex and in a perpetual state of change and evolution. Nothing remains the same over any extended period. My optimism, my passion for art and my continual desire to create is reflected in every aspect of my work."
Melanie is often led by the revolutionary strategy originally put forward in the "Theory of the Dérive" (1956) by Guy Debord. The dérive is defined as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there".
Melanie is an accomplished practicing and exhibiting contemporary artist and as a secondary visual art teacher, she is the Head of Visual Arts at one of Adelaide’s leading independent schools. Melanie’s original artworks have found homes in the USA, UK, Europe, Asia and across Australia.
Whichever piece you choose from Melanie’s collection, it is an original. Melanie does not produce copies or prints and each artwork importantly has its own unique and individual layers, texture and depth to set it apart from any other piece. She is open to commissions and can work to any colour palette and style ideas you may have.