ABOUT

Mel Cryar has been many things over the years - wife, homeschooling mom, designer, foodie, entrepreneur. A couple of her seven children had been interested in visual art, with some of them landing in creative fields like music, writing, graphic design. But Melanie herself, a lover of art galleries, had never imagined herself a painter.
“I’ve always felt drawn to it,” she says. “When I was in college, my favorite classes were interior design and architecture where we were exposed to those ideas. The way a house looked, and shapes and colors. I took textile courses and we worked with fabric. My art education kind of started back then, and it was just me going to museums and galleries."
"When I hit my 50's, I just had that kind of panic,” she says. “I had been raising kids for 25 years. Over a period of seven months, three of our daughters married and our son entered the navy. I felt lost and fearful. So I decided to take an oil class at Cheekwood Museum & Gardens. That began the magic of painting for me. The big thing was the teacher encouraged me—he really believed that I could do it." Mel continues to learn and grow, painting daily in her Franklin, TN studio, and paints outdoors with the Chestnut Group, a Nashville plein air painting community and has participated in local shows and art events.

“I was so moved by the art that I saw (in Paris) and the realization that for this culture, art cannot be separated from their lives. The things they chose to paint—scenes of war, pain and love - life & art is all one thing in France. And how some of them were just completely self-taught.”

Melanie Cryar