The African Love Birds, 2016 by Melanie Gritzka del Villar. All Rights Reserved. I’m a Filipina - German artist with a background in figurative painting. Having lived in Germany, Spain, England, Thailand and now the US, my creative journey has been shaped by an ongoing search for harmony out of disparate cultural and environmental elements. This translates into a sensibility towards stranded objects as holders of fleeting meaning and of latent possibilities for alternative narratives.

My creations are palimpsests traced from a dialogue with the found materials and the environments of which they are a product. I bring to this encounter my own imagery, inviting the individual histories and inherent properties of the surfaces to speak out in each piece. My series ‘On the Line’ are paintings of endangered birds on driftwood which I found on the shores of islands in the Philippines. In uplifting fragments from the discarded, I hope to inspire audiences to challenge given hierarchies of value and recognize the beauty in the scrapped and the forsaken.