Inside the Studio: The Work of Melina Ghaemi

Most paintings try to show you something. A place, a face, a bowl of fruit. Melina Ghaemi's work does the opposite. Her canvases are not pictures of the world outside, they are records of what a feeling looks like from the inside.

We spend a lot of time with these paintings before they ship, so we wanted to slow down and describe what is actually happening on the surface. Here is how the work is made, what it is about, and how it behaves once it is on a wall.

Paint you can read like handwriting

Melina works in the language of abstract expressionism. That means no recognizable objects, no scene to name. What you get instead is the direct trace of the artist's hand moving across the canvas. She describes it better than we can: "I don't paint what I see. I paint what I feel pressing against the inside of my skin. Abstract expressionism gives me the language I need, one without nouns, only verbs."

You can see that idea in the paint itself. Bold, sweeping gestures cross large canvases. Thick impasto passages, where the paint sits raised off the surface, run right up against thin, watery washes. She reaches for a palette knife, lets paint drip, and leaves the marks visible instead of smoothing them away. The result is a surface you can almost read like handwriting, fast in some places, slow and heavy in others.

Her mediums and how they behave

Melina paints mostly in oil, and reaches for acrylic and mixed media when a piece calls for it. Most of the work in her collection at VanArtHub is oil on canvas, which is part of why these paintings hold their depth in person. Oil dries slowly, so it lets her push and blend the paint while it is still wet, then build thick ridges that keep their shape once they cure.

Here is the short version of what each medium does in her hands:

Medium	What it gives the work
Oil	Slow drying, deep color, and the raised impasto ridges you see up close
Acrylic	Faster layers and sharper edges when a passage needs to stay crisp
Mixed media	Added texture and contrast where flat paint would feel too quiet

None of this survives a phone photo. Impasto is a physical thing. The ridge of paint catches the light in the room and changes as you walk past it. That is the part of an original you only get by owning it, and it is the main reason a screen always undersells work like this.

What the paintings are about

The subject of Melina's work is inner life. Emotional states, identity, movement, the feeling of release or transformation. You can hear it in her titles. "End and Beginning." "Sin and Liberation." "Breaking Certainty." "The World We Do Not See." These are not descriptions of a scene, they are names for states of mind.

Her color choices carry the mood. Some pieces run high in contrast, hard blacks against reds, with a lot of tension. Others settle into softer earth tones and feel calmer. Two of her paintings can sit in the same room and pull it in completely different directions, so it is worth choosing the one whose temperature matches the space you have in mind.

Where this work sits best in a room

Big gestural abstraction wants room to breathe. A large open wall, a stairwell, a spot above a long sofa, or the main wall of a dining room. Because the paint is physical, the piece rewards a place where you pass close to it, not one where it hangs high and far away.

A short, honest note on scale. Abstract work like this tends to look larger in person than it does on screen, because the texture and the gestures fill the field. If you are stuck between two sizes for a feature wall, we would usually lean to the larger one. A canvas that dominates the wall reads as a decision. One that floats too small reads as a mistake.

Buying an original with room to change your mind

Every Melina Ghaemi painting we sell is an original, signed by the artist, and one of one. No prints, no reproductions. Each one arrives with a Certificate of Authenticity, and shipping is free and fully insured across Canada and the United States, 3 to 7 business days within Canada and 5 to 10 to the US.

Abstract work is personal, so we give you time to be sure. Live with the painting for 14 days. If it does not feel right on your wall, send it back for a full refund and we cover the return shipping. If your taste changes years from now, our Lifetime Trade-Back lets you return a piece in good condition for store credit. That is how confident we are that these paintings hold up in a real room, not just a gallery.

If you want to see the full run of Melina's oils, start with her artist page, then browse the wider world of Vancouver-made work in our nature and landscape collection or read our guide to Canadian nature art to see where her abstraction sits alongside the rest of the studio.