Melissa Polhamus

Virginia (born 1957)

Melissa Polhamus was born in Ludwigsburg, Germany. She is the adopted daughter of a U.S. military career serviceman and his wife. Melissa grew up in several different American towns as a result of her father’s transfers to various East Coast military bases during her childhood. In 1989, she began to draw from her own imagination while recuperating from depression suffered in the wake of an automobile accident. Shortly thereafter she began to immerse herself in her art. By then she had accumulated a broad range of experience in her personal and professional life. She has since been sporadically employed. Nonetheless, Polhamus is self-taught as an artist.

Her incongruously bright-colored linear drawings are characterized by marked obsessiveness and intense psychological distress. She has described the process of creating these works as entirely spontaneous and intuitive. The compositions are usually overloaded and intricately fragmented. Her drawings have a dreamlike and often nightmarish narrative quality in which, convoluted environments are typically inhabited by cartoonish clothed figures as they carry out activities that are alternately mundane, mysterious, or sinister. Through a labyrinth of interconnected chambers, corridors, stairways and networks, entities subtly transform from one action to the next. The bizarre activities that she depicts, as well as the myriad symbolically resonant details in her drawings, invite psychological analyses that present their own particular challenges. Her drawings often include peculiar vehicles, weaponry, musical instruments, stylized vegetation and jaggedly geometric patterns that contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety. They are mysteriously compelling and consistently original in style.

Tom Patterson
Winston-Salem Journal

Melissa’s work was recently included in the prestigious INSITA triennial exhibition in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her work has also been exhibited at The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, VA as well at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. The narrative aspect of her work is an unusual quality for a liminal or “Singulier” artist.

Melissa Polhamus

Creative Heart Gallery
PO Box 476
Newport, Rhode Island 02840
Phone: 401-847-0991
Fax: 401-847-8498
george@self-taughtart.com