Melat Amha Belay Sahlu/ Landscapes

Melat Amha Belay Sahlu creates realistic and abstract mixed media artworks with pencil, oil pastel crayon, paper, photography, and editing software. She is most excited when gleaning the continuity of shapes across the natural world — from the microscopic to vast landscapes. A lifelong audio artist, Melat began exploring visual expression during a playful watercolor session in the summer of 2023. Since then, she has lost and found herself in days-long meditations with this practice. She now works from her earthen studio in rural Hang Dong, Thailand, where coconuts abound, and karaoke is a kind of religion. Melat’s loyalty to oil pastel crayons seems to derive from the delicious matte-ness of the medium and the child-like transgression of what feels taboo, painting with lipstick. Many of her pieces circle the concepts of movement and negative spaces — no beginning or ending, no limit to what the observer might imagine into the image.

Surrender

The inspiration for these paintings arrived when magic found me, surrendered enough to sweep me up and make sense out of seeming chaos. Sharing these miraculous experiences with loved ones inadvertently created a feedback loop in which each telling made the reality of magic even more true in my life. Each piece was created in a fever of sorts, causing me to lose all sense of time and space, and is infused with this powerful energy. May they impart vitality into any room they are displayed, and may every soul that beholds them be cradled by the curves and imagine possibility into the negative spaces. In honor of this period, I have titled the series Surrender.