Melanie Biehle is an abstract painter whose work explores the emotional and sensory experience of place.
With a lifelong creative path rooted in psychology, writing, photography, and visual storytelling, Melanie brings a deeply intuitive and place-driven approach to abstraction. Her paintings reflect years of observing light, texture, and landscape — from the layered greens and rocky shorelines of the Pacific Northwest to the ocean blues and lived-in modernism of Southern California.
Though she came to painting later in life, her practice holds the depth of someone who has been looking closely for decades. Melanie studied abstract painting and composition at Gage Academy of Art, but her artistic voice is anchored even more in personal discovery, travel, and a profound connection to coastlines. Richard Diebenkorn’s sensitivity to light, space, and aerial perspective remains her most meaningful artistic influence.
Originally from Louisiana, Melanie now paints from her art studio in Seattle and lives just outside the city with her family. Her work is held by private collectors and commercial spaces who value the atmospheric calm, architectural structure, and grounding presence her paintings bring to a space.
Artist’s Statement
My paintings are shaped by the emotional states that travel awakens — spaciousness, curiosity, calm, and inspiration.
I create abstract interpretations of place, drawing from memory, architecture, landscape, and the clarity and openness I feel when I'm near the sea.
Working in oil or acrylic, I build tactile, layered surfaces that echo the worn, lived-in qualities of real environments: a sun-washed hillside town, the edge of a weathered stone, driftwood smoothed by tides, or an ever-changing shoreline shifting with light. Distressing my surfaces with natural materials such as shells or stones, and using texture mediums to build depth, I create artwork that holds the feeling of time, erosion, and touch.
My paintings move between two distinct visual languages: soft, atmospheric color fields and precise, architectural structures. Once seen as opposites, I now understand them as reflections of how I move through the world.
They hold both the calm and inspiration I feel in the places that shape me: the mossy coastlines of the Pacific Northwest, the desert-toned warmth of Southern California, the refined geometry of Paris, and the hillside towns of the Mediterranean where earth, elevation, and sea meet in quiet natural drama.
The ocean is my greatest source of creative energy. It regulates my nervous system, sharpens my senses, and anchors me in clarity. That state — settled and expanded at once — guides everything I make.
In your home, my paintings become an invitation: a way to reconnect with the places that ground you and a quiet call toward what’s still waiting to be discovered.
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