About my work.

Johanna Melvin ( b. 1951) is a London-based artist whose practice is rooted in process, where an intuitive approach is balanced by a strong sense of structure and order, while retaining an openness that allows each work to develop its own internal logic and direction.

The grid structure provides a framework for exploring painterly gesture and colour relationships. Horizontal and vertical lines are employed in rescaled, often interrupted format, suggesting disorderly maps, memory of place or state of mind. The use of colour and artwork titles arise instinctively from specific locations or experiences.

Short passages of writing sometimes accompany these works, not as nostalgia, but perhaps to lead into each work as a nonlinear diary entry.

A new, ongoing series, Time & Motion, places greater emphasis on the gestural. Hard-edged elements remain but now act to define and capture the cursive as it moves across a surface.

At the heart of both strands of work is an interest in stories and writing - and a celebration of handwriting, the latter being a complex, embodied neurological act of human expression at risk of extinction as digital communication increasingly replaces the handwritten mark.

Johanna has exhibited multiple times at The Royal Academy Summer Show and Flowers East, London. She has also exhibited at Hastings Contemporary and The New Art Gallery Walsall among other UK and overseas galleries. Her work is in many private and public collections, including Whitechapel Gallery Archives, The Groucho Club collection and the Fitzwilliam Museum Archive, Cambridge.

Johanna teaches abstract painting at The Essential School of Painting, an independent art school based in London.

My work can be found on Rise Art and SOTA Marketplace.

News and Exhibitions