Melody Gordon is an artist, designer, illustrator, and writer from Memphis. As a multidisciplinary artist, Melody has years of experience with traditional and digital mediums. She enjoys creating paintings and drawings that are colorful, symbolic, and abstract. She is also known for incorporating elements of fantasy.
Nature and botanicals feature prominently in her work. Melody also conducts research on native plant life and the environment for her artwork. Themes like change, joy, hope, and transformation are of personal interest to her and they appear often in her original works.
Melody also writes about the creative process on social media and shares ideas meant to encourage and foster creativity in others.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings use color, symbolism, history, and the environment to make a connection between the natural world that we know and the extraordinary worlds to be found within the lives of Black women.
Through silhouettes, I explore how Black women engage with the natural world. The juxtaposition of these figures with elements of nature, such as the sky, trees, and botanical life, create a fantastical environment that offers me and the viewer an escape. Breaking from the limitations of the real world, I choose a narrative that offers the hope of a better place. The silhouettes are not just autobiographical but also a representation of all women of color and the possibility of a better world that we can inhabit.
In my art, the silhouettes are often entangled with the natural world in the same way that Black women are greatly impacted by our environment. Vines wrap around their arms and torsos to represent the unending growth and change that is definitive of being a living thing on this Earth. Stars and other markings meant to reference celestial bodies are often present to remind me and the viewer that Black women are part of a vast universe and the universe is part of us as well.
The people I portray in my work tell stories about concepts and emotions that can be hard to visualize like hope and fear, joy and despair, and stability and transformation. Color helps the viewer better understand abstract emotions. Therefore, I choose complementary colors that are capable of providing balance between light and dark; highly saturated jewel tones that draw attention and tell the viewer that this element deserves to be seen; and Earth tones that are warm and muted to ground the viewer in this strange and atypical world.
At its core, my paintings and drawings allow the marginalized to imagine themselves in a different environment where their humanity can exist in all its color and wonder.