Melanie P. Brown: Driving My Meat Machine: Flight Fantasies

Melanie P. Brown has a long standing practice of painting in direct response to sound, music, and motion. Since 2020 her process has centered on live and recorded sound, her gestures and movements while painting, and video of birds and her own body in motion. Preparing extensive palettes and integrating pastel and charcoal, she translates rhythm, texture, and spatial perception into layered compositions. Her latest series combines all of these elements and explores how it feels to be inside a body as it moves through space as well as the image of the body itself. In some of the pieces she uses gestures of birds in flight which merge with the body as a way of expressing the feeling of unbounded space and infinite freedom that exists inside the mind. She believes that the most accurate portraits capture what something is doing rather than their static form and describes these paintings as kinetic portraits of the inner and outer self.