Meet the Artist

Melissa

Marler

Painting

“Melissa is currently working to improve her painting technique while forming a unique style, with this, each painting uses specific elements and exaggerates them in a way that enhances the emotion in that moment. Specifically, she enjoys overplaying the lighting and contrast of her paintings while creating dreamlike colours for a dramatizing, surreal effect. Preferring the use of oil and acrylic paint application in her work, Melissa paints her subjects using human figures or skeletons. Bringing to life images she uses from her own photos, or through ideas from her imagination, she strives to render these with an overall realistic technique, but disrupts this style with painterly or gestural changes to the environment. Either using figures as a means to create a dialogue with its soft movements and gestures or using skeletons to have an imagined state of being that distances from reality while still depicting relatable emotions. With each painting, she hopes to continue practicing new styles and new narratives that blend together reality and imagination to bring out an enhanced mood within that moment. ”

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Profile Picture
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Melissa Marler is an artist born in Caracas, Venezuela who moved to Calgary, AB as a young child. She began her drawing as a young child and joined the International Baccalaureate program in the visual arts once she entered High School. Currently she is practicing in Toronto, ON, attending OCAD University while studying in the Drawing and Painting program. Within her practice, Melissa explores new themes and topics with every painting. Focusing on figures and their relationship to the environment surrounding them, she explores how one can use the figure to create a narrative or mood solely through body language, facial expression, and subtle manipulations of the natural world surrounding them. Striving to portray her own emotions that she feels in that moment or while creating her painting, and reflects that in her work through the manipulations of the elements.
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Drawing and Painting
Major Completed, 2021

Oil/Acrylic Painting and Printmaking

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