The Midwife Painting

Internationally recognized Street Painter & Fine Artist.

Born Los Angeles, California March 24th, 1975

Melanie earned her BFA in illustration from Art Center College of Design and her MA in Drawing & Painting from Cal State Fullerton. A Signature
Member of the Pastel Society of America, Melanie is the only female street painter to win the title of Maestro and several gold medals in both Italy and
Germany. Co-Founder of two prominent organizations in the chalk painting world, Street Painting Society and the Street Painting Academy, Melanie
has consulted, painted, and held painting workshops for clients in Turkey, Holland, France, Canada and throughout the U.S. Melanies fine art work
has been exhibited in galleries throughout Southern California.

Melanie Stimmell Van Latums portraits pop with a hardboiled baroque, neo-noir coterie of haunting, flamboyant heroines. Handsome, sinister, and
supremely confident women stare from the canvas with an imperiously mysterious gaze, clearly indicating that no cloister, boudoir, suburb or nursery
could ever contain the canny power of their bodies and minds.

Van Latums cleverly balanced compositions and high-tension-line lighting conjure a triumphant, intelligent feminine charisma a mise-en-scene
flushed with dizzyingly endless dcolletage and the intricate obsessions of coiffure. In playfully provoking erotic traditions, these post-traditionalist
paintings resuscitate the vapid, gaping pin-up model to her proper stance as empress, saint, and icon.