I Liked These Paintings by Melanie Miller

Her work came up in my feed of artwork on my blog and I had to click. It drew me in.

I found many of her paintings very rending.

I was trying to read the medical subtext and then she explains on her blog and on her Flickr gallery page.

This young woman of 33 is struggling against a devastating diseases known as transverse myelitis.

The photographic documentation she did of the toll this has taken on her body was very painful to see.

She has been a dancer in the past and worked in several art forms.

Now she has visual impairment, a permacatheter and a hard struggle.

I added one of her blogs, Neuro Detour, over in my blogroll. I believe she has other blogs you can visit from there.

Her art is often quite plangent and beautiful at the same time.

There seems to be a strong Kandinsky influence in some of the paintings on the site. It's very good stuff.

Melanie Miller's paintings.

I loved these two.

One painting came about by watching people in Rittenhouse Square. The one with the canes or hook figures is titled "Promenade, Rittenhouse Square." What a coincidence that she is a fellow Pennsylvanian and lives off Rittenhouse Square, an area of Philly I love! I have fond memories of a poetry reading I did at the Borders there. And there was once a Peto sculpture (he did very few sculptures) there. That's long gone. And recently didn't M. Night have the trees kill all the people in Rittenhouse Square in that movie.

The other painting is "Uncentered and Twisted with Portacath."

I love the way she created an almost balletic figuration out of the frustration of entanglement with burdensome and awkward medical equipment.

Kudos to the artist.

You can buy originals and prints of her work on the blog I linked to.

Check it out.