Melanie Berman

Bird Song and Catch a Falling Leaf diptych

2022

UK based artist Melanie Berman explores the intrinsic values of her materials whilst infusing her work with a personal language and signature palettes. Her delicious abstract paintings contain variously delicate and strong gestural organic coloured shapes and marks. The non-objective also interests her, as she translates sound into colour and illusionistic forces into lines. The initial marks made on the canvas or wooden panels are embedded in layers of paint, some of these are later excavated through various techniques. Berman adapted her approach to painting and materiality whilst experiencing a period in her life of visual impairment. This period of time heighten her sensory experience and spiritual process adding to a visual language of imagination and new forms of communication. The tactile rustic surfaces articulate the full rawness of authentic compassionate realities. Colour burst onto the surfaces as an act of freedom, whist incorporating historical or current story telling. The embedded layered surfaces became metaphorical palimpsest of indigenous ways and landscapes in their own right. Using thick opaque layers of paint on an intimate scale a tactility developed. As thought turning the paintings into objects to be held and to bring the viewer closer. Acknowledging inter- subjectiveness markings and erasure, whilst at the same time acknowledging forms of transformation, a new soulful contemporary abstraction emerged.