Featured Artist | Melinda Gallop

Melinda Gallop
Miami, FL
Facebook.com/GOJUArt
@GOJUArt

Melinda Gallop is a “Self Taught – Brushless Fine Artist” who has traveled the Country, creating and selling her original masterpieces since 2010. One would be hard-pressed to find a person more varied in her interests and talents than Melinda. In addition to being an artist she is also a National, International, and World Champion Martial Art Competitor. As a 8th Degree Black Belt her karate endeavors brought her to her “ART.” The energy lines that you see in her painting style, quick strokes and fluid movements, come from the energy and movements of her Martial Arts. Through her Martial Arts style, she paints by merging the energies of Karate with the feelings from her soul, “completely brushless.”

She has practiced the martial arts since the early 70’s, growing up in Palmetto Bay, Florida, while working at McDonalds where she was robbed at gun-point and made to crawl into their freezer. An introvert with low self-esteem until that point, she signed up for self-defense karate classes the very next day, and the story began there.

Her work approach is executed without a paint brush, using only her hands, sea sponge, and various sizes of cardboard in which she tears and uses the edges to move the paint across her canvas. She often recycles canvases that would be otherwise discarded – this allows her to pay tribute to the natural recycled World. She combines acrylic paint, at times, tissue paper, tempered glass, and uses rubbing alcohol to easily move the paint across her platform creating each original work of art.

Races | Mixed Media-Acrylic Paint on Canvas, Tissue Paper/Peacock Feather | 4' X 4'
Races | Mixed Media-Acrylic Paint on Canvas, Tissue Paper/Peacock Feather | 4′ X 4′
Sea's the Day | Mixed Media-Acrylic on Canvas | 44" X 40"
Sea’s the Day | Mixed Media-Acrylic on Canvas | 44″ X 40″
Sunny Sails | Mixed Media-Acrylic and Gesso on Canvas | 24" X 30"
Sunny Sails | Mixed Media-Acrylic and Gesso on Canvas | 24″ X 30″
Three Sisters | Mixed Media-Acrylic on Canvas | 4' X 4'
Three Sisters | Mixed Media-Acrylic on Canvas | 4′ X 4′