The Possibility of Alchemy Painting

Melanie Biehle is an abstract painter based in Seattle whose work explores the emotional and sensory experience of place. With a background in psychology, writing, and photography, she creates layered compositions shaped by travel, memory, and the built environment. Her paintings move between soft, atmospheric fields of color and precise, architectural structures -- a duality reflecting the balance of calm and inspiration she finds in the landscapes and cities that shape her. The ocean is her deepest source of creative energy: its shifting blues and ever-changing shoreline inform both her palette and her emotions. She also draws from the mossy greens and rocky coasts of the Pacific Northwest, the lived-in modernism and desert plant life of Southern California, the refined geometry of Parisian Haussmann buildings, and the dramatic hillside towns of the Mediterranean, where elevation, light, and weathered surfaces above the sea create quiet, natural drama. Distressing her surfaces with natural materials like shells and stones or building layers with texture mediums, Melanie grounds her abstractions in the tactile memory of real places, exploring the intersection of abstraction, architecture, and the immersive experience of landscape.