Janessa Maria Melendez – Teaching Artist Janessa Maria Melendez, born in Brooklyn NY, is a multidisciplinary artist and educator living in Miami FL. Janessa gained her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the University of Miami with a concentration in painting and in a minor in Art History. The main focus and exploration of her works come from the objective mindset of a teacher investigating the visual language of non-objective art. As an art studio teacher, Janessa encouraged this objective approach toward students’ individual and developmental needs when exploring visual art materials. This classroom practice became an important part of Janessa’s success in her teaching environment and played an important role when exploring her own painting series, “The Non-Objective”. In this work, she began to find the purity and playfulness she had always observed in the young students within her classroom. Breaking away from the traditional frame of a painting, she works with clear acrylic as a way to examine textures, depth, and transparency. Working in a constant push and pull, her work dances to balance the gestural nature of paint and the calming nature of geometry against one another. The transparent areas of color projecting each layer of her techniques onto the next allow us to look at, into, and past the picture planes.
Janessa Maria Melendez – Teaching Artist
