Spirit Of The Sea

Voyagers, oil painting by Melody Phaneuf

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From a life of constant motion, the objects chosen for the painting, Voyagers rest, echoing their past. Along with shells that refused to stay submerged, floats mark a rhythmic line of placement through the vertical composition.

Glass objects frolic with the light, sometimes halting and pushing it backwards, sometimes allowing it to penetrate, making it transparent. The floats’ etched surfaces add another texture to the composition and one more layer to the story.

Light, movement, and the forces that animate are what compel me to paint. Each picture is a quest, ultimately revealing the mechanics of an enigmatic realm of experience, the result of certain combinations of sensory input, reason and active imagination.

The floats and shells in Voyagers, having lived upon and within the movement of waves, convey to me the spirit of the sea. Breathing color and reflected light enlivens the arrangement. Voyagers suggests an eagerness to tell us a story.

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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.

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Flow

Flow, Oil Painting by Melody Phaneuf

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Watching moving water create ever-changing abstract patterns is mesmerising. The rhythmic flow of cause and effect reminds me of a perpetual motion machine that I saw at the science museum one childhood summer.

Waves surge up, intersect, and divide direction. Movement and light expose and interweave line, shape and color in kaleidoscopic flow.

Conceivably, like snowflakes, no two, wave patterns are alike. No evidence remains to test the theory, only an impression on the memory. Or perhaps like particles in quantum physics, they change when someone is looking at them.

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Water's Edge, by Melody Phaneuf

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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.

Make Your Life a Work of Art~
Online shopping at MelodyTheArtist.com/shop

Download our free 2010 Calendar
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Painting The Park, Gloucester

Triton's Call, 20 x 16 oil painting by Melody Phaneuf
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There is an enchanted park in Gloucester where I love to paint. Its mythic quality reminds me of the coast of Brittany, haunted by the ghosts of Parsifal and Merlin.

I have the sense a presence here, inhabiting a dimension that I cannot see, the carved steps in enormous rocks their stairways to invisible second floor bedrooms. Pink and ochre granite seems to radiate energy that balances too many hours in fluorescent lighting and ambient noise.

From high on the rocks I can look back at where I live, watch the bridge endlessly raise and lower, funneling boats from the Annisquam River into the harbor. People run, others bicycle, some walk dogs while I blissfully paint and observe the distant animation of a busy world.

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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.


Make Your Life a Work of Art~
Online shopping at MelodyTheArtist.com/shop


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Paintings Above ~

Yellow Trees by The Sea,
Melody Phaneuf,
8 x 10 oil painting

Pathway, Melody Phaneuf,
8 x 10 oil painting

Halfmoon Beach, Melody Phaneuf,
8 x 10 oil painting

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Seeing Harmony

Blue Hydrangeas, oil painting by Melody Phaneuf

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Art is a Harmony parallel with Nature~ Paul Cezanne

We seem to have need for the structures that create harmony. Harmonic relationships are built on similarities. Visual similarity can clothe itself in many ways; line, shape, size, color, and texture are some aspects.

Seeing an underlying order helps to simplify a complex subject. In Blue Hydrangeas, the order was found in the negative shapes, which carved out the flowers and visually rhymed with one another. Color and textural similarities further enhance the idea and are balanced against contrasting values. The complex tangle of hydrangeas is seen as a harmonic arrangement.

There is always a connection to be found. Looking for harmony is often a satisfying solution.

Blue Hydrangeas, 8 x 10 oil painting by Melody Phaneuf

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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.

Make Your Life a Work of Art~
Online shopping at MelodyTheArtist.com/shop

Download our free 2010 Calendar
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Art As Experience

Anchors Aweigh, Oil Painting by Melody Phaneuf, Private Collection
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Josef Albers said that Art is not an object but an experience. It can be both, in the same way that a theatre production might be life altering to some, but to others it’s pleasant entertainment.

My own path from appreciation for the decorative to the realm of aesthetic experience began while viewing murals from Pompeii. Bob Hunter took our group of Vesper George Art School students to see the excavated walls installed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

I recall that the scale of the room was such that the figures on the walls were life size. The subject of the murals depicted the cult of Dionysus. As I walked around the room I was conscious that the scenes seemed to blend into one another seamlessly but it wasn’t until the finale, where the emissary of Dionysus strikes the initiate that I was stunned with awe. It was only then that I understood what being “moved” by a work of art meant. My body swooned under the crack of the switch.

Determination to understand the secret of my experience drew me into many years of studying abstract relationships of imagery. Ultimately, I surmised the cause of my astonishment to be a combination of a building rhythm of arcs coupled with identification to life size figures. The effect was like a tom-tom, which culminated with a final sweeping arc of the lash in the last scene.

It is more than fair to say that the murals of Pompeii transformed my life. Until then I had seen
making art as something enjoyable, but the idea of evoking emotion, of arranging the cause of aesthetic experience became my life’s journey.

Art should at the very least, I think, ameliorate its surroundings. But the greatest art should transport us beyond ordinary experience.

Above, murals from
The Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii

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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.

Make Your Life a Work of Art~
Online shopping at MelodyTheArtist.com/shop

Download our free 2010 Calendar
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New Paintings Explore Pattern

Fishing, 8 x 10 Oil Painting by Melody Phaneuf

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Abstract pattern is the fundamental structure of a painting. A pattern can be achieved in many ways: through color, shape, or light and shadow.

The new pictures I have been painting explore light as it caresses the landscape. Interlocking patterns of light and shadow dance across land, over waves, and between rocks.

The 8 by 10 inch paintings are little gems, perfect for small spaces or to group in larger ones. The little paintings are on panel, framed in a simple gold frame, and priced at $350.

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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.

Make Your Life a Work of Art~
Online shopping at MelodyTheArtist.com/shop

Download our free 2010 Calendar
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Pictured above~ Water's Edge, Bench by the Sea

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Waking up the Senses

Lilacs & Peaches, Oil Painting by Melody Phaneuf
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In yoga class we begin our practice with subtle movements to gently wake up the muscles. Likewise, in springtime, a gentle waking up of our senses is pleasurable. Nature provides us with new growth, delicate color, and birdsong.

I’m yearning to be surrounded with cool greens and violet. I submit to the urge to remove the red accents from my living room and replace them with soft pinks and peach. These color harmonies attune me to the subtle transition of the season.

I spend time gardening and arranging my surroundings. A lovely, artistic environment nurtures a mindful existence. It inspires appreciation for all that fills our life with simple pleasure.

Spring Meadow, Oil Painting by Melody Phaneuf
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Boston Artist, Melody Phaneuf is well known for her evocative still life, landscape, and portrait paintings. Her paintings are regularly on view at The Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street; at Fenway Studios, Boston by appointment; and North Shore Art in Gloucester from May through October. Phaneuf ‘s paintings have been exhibited at The National Arts Club in New York City, Galerie Herouet in Paris, and with Art du Monde, in Japan.

Melody The Artist Home, founded with photographer and color specialist, Martha DiMeo, features Phaneuf’s original oil paintings on tumbled marble tile murals and beverage coasters, fine art prints, and handmade note cards.

Make Your Life a Work of Art~
Online shopping at MelodyTheArtist.com/shop

Download our free 2010 Calendar
Commission a painting
Fan MelodyTheArtist on facebook
Follow MelodyTheArtist on twitter

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