About

Born and raised in small-town Texas, Melody Noelani is the third of six children within a Christian Hispanic household. Throughout all her life, she continuously cultivated her love her artmaking and is now pursuing it wholeheartedly. Her work throughout all mediums reflects on her love for her family and her admiration for nature through a spiritually appreciative lens.

My name is Melody Noelani Drake Mendoza and I am the third daughter born into a beautiful family of eight intelligent and creative souls. Since childhood, I have known my passionate love for drawing, art making, and creative expression, and have been blessed everyday since with the opportunity to do what I love most. My work throughout all forms of expression is founded in a Spirit-led appreciation for the beauty of life and God’s wondrous creations. I am a passionate dreamer and strive to convey a dreamlike, hopeful romanticism in everything I do. I am also a devout, born again believer and aspire to, above all things, honor God and share my love for the beauty of His creations for the time He has given me on this earth.

Through visual specificity and conceptual ambiguity, I romantically represent the physical world around me, focusing heavily on the hidden and delicate details of the living earth. I enjoy making works which impact on both ends of scale, presenting imagery with bright color fields which initially catch the eye from a distance and reveal hidden details about themselves when more intimately investigated. In everything I do, I wish to create an experience of harmony, peace, and a profound sense of appreciation for the simplicities and intimate intricacies of life and nature. Surrounding themes of fragility and faintness, my work aims both to capture the beauty and perishability of life as well as to serve as a universal reminder of the responsibility we have to protect, cherish, and care for the precious and fleeting blessings we are given: nature, time, and each other.

I believe that the desire to create is a calling and purpose which we have all inherited from our Creator, and I strive to encourage and inspire others through my work to continue their own artistic journeys and creative callings. My beliefs, although perhaps not immediately readable to most, are embedded within the fabric of my life and work, serving as the foundation for the essence of both what I express and why. I feel strongly that contemporary processes of creation and ways of living are far too focused on newness and utility and, as a traditionalist at heart, I wish to revive antiquity, tradition, and slow-paced living within my work on this earth: a simple and sincere contribution, an offering of appreciation, a desire to do God’s will and let His will be done, “on earth as it is in heaven.” (NKJV Bible, Mathew 6:10)