There are artists who are inspired by life, and there are artists who have truly lived it. Melanie Winning is firmly in the second camp.
With an MA with Distinction from Camberwell College of Arts and a career that has taken her from the West End stage to the studios of Disney, from the V&A to the art direction world of Pink Floyd, Melanie brings to her paintings a life richly and boldly inhabited.
Her work centres on one of the oldest preoccupations in human storytelling: the mask. For Melanie, masking is not concealment – it is revelation. Her canvases are populated with theatrical, surreal characters; masked figures set within intimate vignettes that feel at once like stage sets and dreamscapes. There is warmth in them, and wit, and a deep awareness of the long history of disguise as a vehicle for truth.
“Masking in storytelling is an endless source of inspiration in world human history,” she says, “and in that tradition my point of view is expressed.”
It is a point of view shaped by decades at the intersection of art and performance. As a make-up artist and tutor at the V&A for twelve years, Melanie worked at the place where art history and living practice meet. She worked with Storm Thorgerson, the legendary art director behind some of Pink Floyd’s most iconic imagery. She styled for Disney. And long before all of that, she played Columbia in the very first West End production of The Rocky Horror Show – which perhaps explains why her paintings feel so alive with theatrical energy, so aware of the transformative power of costume and character.
Today, Melanie continues to perform as one half of alt-pop duo Mel & Marcel, gigging across London and Essex with dates this summer including the Dublin Castle in Camden and the Manningtree Beer Festival. Her art and her music are, she would likely say, expressions of the same impulse: to inhabit characters, to explore the space between the self and the persona, to find the truth in the theatrical.
Her paintings have been exhibited at the Medici Gallery on Cork Street and she has been featured twice as a spotlight artist in Reclaim Magazine. As a VAA member, she took part in OpenSpaces 2025, where she sold multiple works – bringing her art directly to new audiences in unexpected spaces.
Melanie Winning is a reminder that a life lived across disciplines is not a distraction from an artistic practice. It is the practice
Explore Melanie’s work at melaniewinning.com
Listen to Mel & Marcel at https://www.youtube.com/@melandmarcel
Upcoming Live Performance Dates https://www.melandmarcel.com/gigs