Mel McKenzie - New Zealand's Bokeh Artist
Award-winning oil paintings: often familiar & always enriching.
Hey from NZ’s deep South, Mel here! 👋🏽
My signature bokeh paintings might remind you of what it’s like to forget your glasses. Maybe a scene viewed through a foggy car window?
Either way, they’re paintings capturing the beauty always around us, while banishing the humdrum details of life to a unobtrusive blur.
Enriching spaces with art
What do art, geography and public health have in common? Oh hey 👋🏽 It's me!
My academic qualifications, mashed with self-taught art skills, result in paintings and prints that improve your spaces AND your wellbeing.
How exactly?? These rich oil paintings remind you to cherish the gift each day brings, help you practice shinrin-yoku and moon bathing, while encouraging you to use art as a form of creative expression in your home. (What do your walls say about you?)
When I'm not painting
I'm probably in a meeting or my inbox... as a trustee for Arts Murihiku, Secretary for the Southland Art Society or supporting other artists to thrive in their art businesses through Amanda Heath's Thriving Artist Business School.
Four growing-too-fast kids call me "Muuuuum", I'm wife to a 4th generation farmer, a dog's best friend and 2 rescue cats just became 4 🙈.
Putting softness on a pedestal
From our farmhouse, I soak in beauty from dawn 'til dusk (and beyond!): in the fog cloaking the valley below, the soaring clouds above and the (infrequent, but always impressive) Aurora Australis.
With a blurred lens, lots of jasmine green tea and an (almost) daily art practice, I'm making art to stop you focusing so damn hard all the time, and help you to see softly instead.
Look for the light, the beauty and the good.
x Mel
A favourite quote
"Her messy hair a visible attribute of her stubborn spirit.
As she shakes it free, she smiles, knowing wild is her favourite colour."
The Penny Drops
The Penny Drops has been my studio name since my first forays into 'making things' over a decade ago! The Penny Drops represents the literal ‘dropping’ of my maiden name - Penny - upon marriage, but also The Moment when it clicks – an approach suited both to making paintings and buying them. Trusting your gut instinct when it says ‘this is it’.
After many years of not knowing where my calling lay, the penny has dropped and I now confidently know ART is it for me.
I love when The Penny Drops for you too - that moment of falling in love with a painting.
x Mel