Poppy Melia - Irish Artist living in Kerry

Ever since I first saw Poppy’s work, when she was a textile student at NCAD, I have loved her vibrant, earthy, warm sense of colour and texture. Nature was always close to everything she designed, whether a printed cotton, a beaded necklace or a drawing or painting. She never seemed to falter in the strong yet sensitive decorative patterns she made, inspired by the plants, flowers, fruits, grasses and leaves of nature which surrounded her first in Kerry, in Tuscany and on the exotic South Sea travels she went on with her mother and sister. There was always something deeply, quietly, subtly satisfying about her work, rhythmically and compositionally, her sinuous linear treatment caressing the forms she makes her subjects. Then, I saw an exhibition of her paintings, which showed her being less decorative, more watchful of detail and structure. Over the past fifteen or so years, her careful observation of birds, rivers, islands, the flora and fauna of the unsullied landscapes she inhabits has led to increasingly beautiful, although still technically exacting studies, where she can shift the focus of the observer from immersion in a foreground whose every branch, leaf, rock and crevice she knows so well to distant peeps of equally familiar undulating fields, hedges, walls and waters beyond. There you may discern tiny images of a special house, a cherished tree or person, a microcosmic detail, where every part of the natural world is carefully recorded and freely moulded into Poppy Melia’s unique vision.

Dr. Nicola Gordon Bowe
Art Historian, Author