A Graduate of Art Center College of Design and a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, Melanie is a prolific Fine Artists, creating beautiful imagery in Oils and in Soft Pastel with such finesse and mastery that her Renaissance inspired figures dance off the canvas with whimsical charm. She has shown at prominent Southern California Galleries such as La Luz De Jesus, The Brewery, The 57 Underground, Spring Arts Collective, and Deborah Martin Gallery.

In addition to her Fine Art, Melanie is also a leader in the Street Painting world. She is the only female street painter to win the title of Maestro and several gold medals in both Italy and Germany. Co-Founder of two prominent organizations in the chalk painting world, Street Painting Society and the Street Painting Academy, Melanie has consulted, painted, and held painting workshops for clients in Turkey, Holland, France, and Canada and throughout the U.S.

Melanie is a strong supporter of Arts in Education and Therapy and shares her love of painting with the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Los Angeles Music Center, Cal State Fullerton, Irvine Valley College and her own Street Painting Academy.

Visit Melanie's Street Painting Gallery

With aspirations in children’s book illustration my fine art has always portrayed a feeling of the sweet and whimsical. They are intimate vignettes of past lives plucked from my wandering and restless unconscious. My paintings flaunt a playful interpretation of my own personal dance between feminine independence and unwelcome solitude. Painting figures that represent the ‘Eternal Woman’ as a domestic goddess or the vintage idea of feminine beauty as decor and vessel of fertility has lead to an exploration of a woman’s role in tomorrow’s society - The Avant Garde.

Drawing inspiration from the master works of Italian and French Classicists and American pin-up artists, my paintings are deeply influenced by my own religious background and the natural relationship that I easily find between the idea of beauty and femininity in art from the Madonna and Saints to glamorous Hollywood starlets. Intrigued by Victorian Nudes and vintage erotic photographs I am drawn to the confidence the models convey in their own sexuality. The juxtaposition of these very different ideas with fetish whimsy is what these new paintings represent.



“Melanie Van Latum’s portraits pop with a hardboiled baroque, neo-noir coterie of haunting, flamboyant heroines. Handsome, sinister, and supremely confident women stare from the canvas with an imperiously mysterious gaze, clearly indicating that no cloister, boudoir, suburb or nursery could ever contain the canny power of their bodies and minds.

Van Latum’s cleverly balanced compositions and high-tension-line lighting conjure a triumphant, intelligent feminine charisma – a mise-en-scene flushed with dizzying endless décolletage and the intricate obsessions of coiffure. In playfully provoking erotic traditions, these post-traditionalist paintings resuscitate the vapid, gaping pin-up model to her proper stance as empress, saint, and icon.”     -Quintan Ana Wikswo