Balancing Act Painting

The rich hues and vibrant compositions of Melissa Teitel’s paintings bring to life the richness and vibrancy of human experience. Melissa holds nothing back in life nor her work. Her brushstrokes layer pain and joy, tears and laughter, blessings and grief. Her canvases are raw, authentic, and intimate gestures of interwoven and overlapping color and texture. She piles mediums atop one another with little regard for rules or convention - one day spray painting a vintage Christian Dior house coat, the next dipping handwoven fabrics into vats of dye made from henna and flowers, and still the next stomping her paint drenched feet across a roll of un-stretched canvas. While Melissa’s foundation is in traditional methods of artistic study, her boundless spirit felt out of place in the stultifying world of fruit bowl still lifes. Today, her abstract and process-driven work is rooted in guts and intuition, slashed with handwritten notes about the trauma and healing within her life journey. To understand her work, one need only read the tattoo that spans her forearm and is the tagline of her clothing brand: “Art is Bravery.”