mel rea

Mel Rea's artistic journey is rooted in her grandfather Sam's beehives. Raised in Russia, Sam dreamed from childhood of one day building an apiary — a dream he fulfilled as an adult in the United States. As a girl, Mel wandered among his hives, finding a peace that shaped her lasting reverence for the natural world. Fittingly, her full name, Melissa, means honeybee in Greek. Years later, a small batch of beeswax discovered in her grandmother's basement — a remnant of Sam's final hives — would redirect the course of her art.

Mel began her career in ceramics, earning a BFA from Kent State University and spending nearly seventeen years creating large-scale figurative sculptures marked by intricate detail, some drawing on Egyptian and Japanese dress traditions. When she rediscovered her grandfather's beeswax, it became the bridge from sculpture to painting, drawing her into encaustic art — a medium with roots in fifth-century B.C. Greece. Its capacity for carving and building surfaces echoed her sculptural instincts, while its soft, waxy finish offered a new kind of depth.

Today, Mel works across acrylics, pastels, gouache, and oil sticks, building layered, abstract canvases through brushing, dripping, and scraping. Her paintings no longer rely on literal representation, instead evoking romance, botanicals, humor, and sensuality through color and form. Drawing on Japanese aesthetics, her love of animals, and the natural world, she creates work — believing thought shapes reality — meant to invite warmth, connection, and quiet reflection.