Biography

Marion Emerson Melchiorre

Marion Emerson Melchiorre was born into an Air Force family in Roswell, N.M. The eldest of five brothers and a sister, she was the first in the family to go to college. Growing up in most of the Western states, she considers New Mexico to be home because of her family ties in Silver City. Marion drew horses and people on old notebooks her dad brought from the base.

In junior high, she won the California state wide competition of the National Forestry Division for best poster design. She excelled in the arts and was the Art Commissioner for high school class. As a talented  high school artist, she attended life drawing classes at a local college.

Southwestern College brought opportunities to use equipment to build her own  triangular canvases, fire raku pottery, develop and print photos in photo-journalism department lab. She was employed as the assistant to the art history department. After two years, Marion transferred to Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood, California.

Arriving in Hollywood without a car, she rented a upstairs room for $50. a month near the college on Wilton Ave. The diversity and the stimulation of Los Angeles was a large part of the learning experience at Immaculate Heart College (IHC). The calligraphy that I learned from David Mekelburg has always been a part of my creativity.  After two years, she graduated from IHC  with an Art Major and Sociology Minor.

Marion began her plein air career using watercolors after graduation. Part time work was taken to enable her to continue painting. Waiting on tables at the Johnny’s Steak House on Hollywood Blvd., delivering the U.S. mail, driving the postal trucks down Hollywood Blvd.and Sunset Blvd. for mail box pick ups. And finally, a part time job assisting with special education children in the  inner city elementary schools of  Los Angeles.  In 1976,she returned to earn a Secondary Teaching Credential in Art Education at California State University Los Angeles.

All the while, Marion has continued to evolve as an artist. Preferring to paint in plein air, she backpacked and camped with her watercolor equipment. She painted  Los Angeles’ Chinatown to Moro Bay, and Mexico’s dry desert near the boarder town of Jacumba, CA to the Sea of Cortes.   Her watercolors hang in private collections  throughout Southern California and New Mexico.

Marion taught  for thirty-six years for LAUSD in Watts, East L.A. and  downtown Los Angeles.

For the past three years, she has been painting in oils in plein air and on commissions in the studio.  A member of the California Art Club, two of her oils, A.C.Vroman and  Hahamungna Oak, where accepted into the CAC’s Blinn House Exhibition 2010 displayed at the Womens City Club of Pasadena.

Her studio  “Project 2010 ” are oils painted from vintage photographs. Several of these were exhibited at Jones Coffee Roasters of Pasadena in Dec. ’10.