Professor turned painter

Scott Melville enjoys words, movement and color, all which are captured in his creations.

Melville hopes his work helps a viewer “see some of the beauty this busy humming world may have caused you to miss” and he accomplishes that by illustrating the quiet beauty found within his subjects. To animals he gives personality, and to people he gives character. He gives unique angles to landscapes and seascapes, and life to still lifes.

Melville also captures action; bicycle riders leaning into a turn; a swimmer cutting into the water; baseball, soccer and basketball players and wrestlers deep in concentration.

For the last 28 years, Melville has been a professor at Eastern Washington University in the Physical Education Department.

In 1984, he enrolled in a Spokane Parks and Recreation “Beginning Watercolor” class. “Ever since, I have happily adhered to a goal of painting each week,” he said, “My painting has become more and more a part of my life as my skill and personal style has gradually developed.”

Around 1990, Melville took a trip to Ireland for a faculty exchange. He biked around and took photos of his surroundings. While a local pointed out a panoramic view of the area, Melville would be sneaking off to photograph an interesting fence post. “That was a turning point and really got me going,” he said, “I worked at re-creating the photos.”

Though he still works in watercolor, he has taken to using egg tempura which is a slower process. “For me it entails a slow process of stippling layers upon layers of colors.” He calls his work “unabashedly representational.”

“My goal is neither to replicate nor distort an image but rather to enhance the mood of the piece through subtly enriching or fading the hues and values,” he said.

He has a working studio in his South Hill home, where more than 100 of his paintings decorate the walls. In another room, Melville’s wife Julie has all the tools needed to mat and frame each piece.

It has only been within the last few years that Melville has shown his work at a gallery, in Priest Lake, Idaho, at the juried show at Art on the Green, and at a home studio/gallery on the South Hill called Spectrum. He has sold some pieces and won a first-place award through the Spokane Watercolor Society for his portrait of a curious gorilla called “Face to Face.”

Recently, his love of sport, poetry and painting have come together in the form of a book called “The Scent of These Armpits: Poetic Thoughts on Sport” which he “edited and annotated.”

The cover of the book is one of his paintings, and the poems within have been enjoyed and collected by Melville for years. “My two aesthetic loves are art and poetry,” he said. “It seems to me that an important function of both the poet and artist is to be sensitive to beauty.”