Artist Highlight

Some people are just born creative and their creativity always finds an outlet, be it problem solving, cooking or in Melanie O’Keefe’s case, the arts. O’Keefe has two great loves, ballet and painting. Growing up, she showed great drawing ability. In fact, in elementary school she taught other kids how to draw. She also took ballet and ultimately became a principal dancer in a small ballet company. She concentrated on her dancing until she went to college. Art was discouraged as “you have to be able to support yourself”. O’Keefe went for a degree in finance because her brother and sister were doing well with their finance degrees. O’Keefe was miserable but still managed to graduate. After marrying, she wanted to go back to school. By this time art was a thing of the past and she decided to get a degree in Interior Design. Back then there was little or no graphic design on computers so everything was drafted by hand. O’Keefe was able to intern and then went to work for an international design firm where she mostly focused on renderings. Working on the renderings stirred up the desire to do art again. She credits her current ability to see spatially and to internalize measurements to those early years of drafting. Years later O’Keefe volunteered to do murals in two large halls of a church’s nursery. Not once did it occur to her that she couldn’t do it. She created the scenes and invented all the characters. To this day she still receives compliments on her work there. It was this project that spurred her on to try painting on canvas. Well this turned out to be the beginning of an eventual career.

Not having any formal training O’Keefe just assumed that the more
real a painting looked the better the art. She was so very naive. It
would take her a month to do just one painting but it was so
realistic that you would have thought it was a photograph. She
even did a portrait of her two sons, although technically it was
quite good, her use of color needed some work.

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