Paintings and Drawings

Melanie Comber 1970

British artist Melanie Comber’s distinctive oil and pigment works elicit an emotional response through their abstract composition and perspective. The artist layers diffrent ratios of oil paint to pigment, giving a rich coloration with a unique, bold matte textured finish. Once applied, Comber introduces a third dimension to her works by carving haptic patterns that evoke terrestrial scenes of beaches, roads, and other landscapes.

Comber’s palpably textural artworks explore notions of spatial focus, toying with scale and distance as she layers and carves into paint, and dusts the surface with powdery pigment. Often appearing as aerial views of anonymous landscape – like the surface of the moon – or conversely, magnified microscopic matter, Comber’s works are both ethereal and bold renderings of abstracted landscapes.

Born in 1970 in London, Comber graduated from Wimbledon of Art in 1993 with a BA in Fine Art Painting. She went on to receive her MFA in Painting from Chelsea College of Art in 1994. She has been exhibtited extensively in the UK and abroad. She has been in notable touring shows including the coveted Royal Academy Summer Show in 2011. In 2010 Comber was a finalist in the Marmite Art Prize. The artist’s works are in numerous public collections including Deutschebank, Coutts, RBS, Hiscox, RGB Underwriting, Jupiter, Pantheon Ventures, The David Roberts Foundation, Sainsburys and numerous private collections in the UK and abroad.... read more