Melany Groothuis, born in Amsterdam, is an artist who works across multiple disciplines but primarily focuses on painting. As a young girl, she was fascinated by women from the Dutch Golden Age and their hoop skirts; many of her early...
Read MoreMelany Groothuis, born in Amsterdam, is an artist who works across multiple disciplines but primarily focuses on painting. As a young girl, she was fascinated by women from the Dutch Golden Age and their hoop skirts; many of her early drawings reflected this interest until the age of eight or nine. From the age of ten, she concentrated on portrait drawing, often using her family as models. At twelve, she created her first oil painting, during which period her first surrealistic and abstract works emerged.
After a foundation year at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, she went on to study Interior Architecture at the Royal Academy of Art. During this time, she and a fellow student, Paul Zuidgeest, won a design competition for the “snerttram” in Rotterdam.
Alongside her work as an artist, Melany also works as an interior architect. Although she often has a clear sense of the direction a painting will take, she creates her work in an intuitive way, leaving room for new ideas and insights to arise during the process. Her paintings are shaped using brushes, palette knives, and sometimes cloth or rollers, giving them an authentic character. The interplay between rough and refined elements brings harmony to her work, while her striking use of color draws the viewer into an atmosphere of her own creation.
