Feature Artist of the month – Marie Melnyczuk
Born and raised in Devon of a Greek father and Scottish mother, Marie Melnyczuk couldn’t have travelled much farther across the UK to find herself, as she does now, in the Uists.
Her journey has taken her via a brief spell in Majorca and a considerable time in London, where much of her artistic experience was fashioned at a time when the so-called Young British Artists, such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin were turning the art establishment on its head – or indeed pickling it in formaldehyde.
Like many creative people, Marie wasn’t well served by the country’s education system and drifted listlessly through a school structure geared towards creating workers rather than artists. As is often the case, she left school with no real sense of where she was heading in life.
When added to the break-up of her parents’ marriage as she was about to reach her teenage years it becomes clear that Marie’s early years were difficult: ‘My mum was plunged into a really bad depression and I had a really tough childhood. I don’t think I really got myself sorted until I became a Christian when I was about twenty-seven.’
But if one thing was able to take her away from the demands of the reality she was growing up in, it was art, or more specifically, colour: ‘I’m very fortunate in one respect,’ she says:‘All of my life, I’ve been into colour. You could give me any object and say to me, “mix that colour”, and I could mix it exactly.’
It was an ability that served her well in her early career, ensuring she was able to get good commissions. Not as an artist, but as a painter and decorator. ‘I was very good at marbling and graining,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes you would get a bathroom, say, that was completely marbled, but for one reason or another, usually because it was too complicated, a section couldn’t be done. That was where I came in. I could match that marble so exactly that it was impossible to tell the difference.’
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