Mel Gausden

Bau-Xi Gallery

Title: Study for Long Afternoons

Dimensions: 22" x 30"

Medium: Oil on paper, framed in white

Value: $1,900

Date: 2022

Courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery and the Artist

Mel Gausden is an emerging Canadian artist who explores themes of personal and cultural identity through traditions of self-portraiture and landscape painting. Her work combines symbols and markers of Canadiana with painterly gesture, mark-making, and bold highlights. Neon silhouettes add a contemporary freshness and highlight the inherent distortion of personal narratives. Gausden’s manipulation of oil paint varies from sculptural—bending and piling thick layers of paint into matchsticks of textured impasto—to painterly— diluting paint until it drips with controlled precision. Gausden’s process is significantly determined by the length of time in which her source material is transformed by time into nostalgic images; a process that can take years. Once memories are bound to her images, the narrative emerges and is rendered in paint. Mel Gausden earned her Bachelor of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009. She lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.