Art Exhibit at Cafe NeverMatters now Open!

For the month of July, My paintings from the Okanagan and Turkey will be hanging in Cafe Nevermatters Cafe and Bistro at 340 Robinson Road Naramata.

Stop in for a coffee or a glass of wine and tell Angelo I said Hi!

(And while you are at it, check out the nicely decorated walls and bathrooms!)

Prints of "A Day at Elephant Island Winery" are also available through the Elephant Island Orchard Wines Tasting Room and Gift Shop.

A big thanks to MyNaramata for writing a small write up about my show at Cafe never Matters and how it related to Elephant Island as well. The article is below, but if you'd like to read the article at its original source, please click here.

Thanks again, Craig!

Link to Cafe NeverMatters

Link To Elephant Island Orchard Wines

1st July 2011

Café Art Show

Editor

Angelo Albano of Café Nevermatters helps artist Melanie Mehrer hang one of her series from Naramata life.

Melanie’s art will fill the café for the month of July. She’ll have many of her funky and whimsical pieces of local life and lore on the walls, as well as some of her work depicting life in Turkey, where she lived in 2009.

Angelo and Melanie are holding a recently finished piece title ‘A Day at Elephant Island.’

Melanie says she is inspired by the way the local winery supports many community and charitable programs and events. This acrylic ink drawing depicts Elephant Island’s crew in the process of making the winery's latest champagne, Pink Elephant.

Also, shown below is a piece featuring Angelo behind the café counter. Angelo says he loves featuring an eclectic mix of local artists on the walls of Cafe Nevermatters.

Here are the previous articles on the work of Naramata’s Melanie Mehrer:
http://www.mynaramata.com/cgi-bin/show_articles.cgi?ID=1346&TOPIC=0
http://www.mynaramata.com/cgi-bin/show_articles.cgi?ID=910&TOPIC=0
http://www.mynaramata.com/cgi-bin/show_articles.cgi?ID=470&TOPIC=0
http://www.mynaramata.com/cgi-bin/show_articles.cgi?ID=512&TOPIC=0

A Day At Elephant Island Winery!

Welcome to Elephant Island Orchard Wines...
There are no elephants and there is no island but the vanguard spirit does rein supreme here.

Classic wine making traditions fused with a dose of fun, a passion for fresh, local fruit and a love of challenge are the foundations of our wine portfolio.

Wines to amuse and to amaze...
Expect the unexpected and prepare for a flavor voyage!

~From The Elephant Island Website

A Day at Elephant Island Winery, 11x14" Ink on Watercolour paper, June 2011

This spring, I was hanging out in Cafe Nevermatters (known to me as Angelo's Coffee shop) when I had the pleasure of finally meeting Miranda Halliday face to face. Miranda's name has popped across my computer screen several times since returning to Canada since she is firmly committed to supporting the community of Naramata and other charities in various ways. (For Instance, Elephant Island Winery has a line of $25 bottle of champagne for sale, where 100% of the proceeds go to the Children's Hospital of BC. How could you not buy a bottle? I did!)

Miranda's grandmother was an architect and built this funky little house on the property she bought as a retirement investment. Miranda's Grandfather was convinced the property was a 'white elephant" hence the name "Elephant Island Winery. Even though the day I visited the winery the discorging was happening in the parking lot, I really wanted to paint this little building!

Miranda had seen my work in few charity auctions, and so she invited me up to Elephant Island Winery, (which she owns and runs with her husband Del), to see how some of the ways their fruit wine is made at Elephant Island. Luckily, my time in Naramata coincided with the rather exciting process of discorging. (Removing the sediment from the aged wine in barrels and moving it to bottles for a longer fermentation period. See? I'm learning!)

The dosaging of the wine- (say this word like you are French- dosaaaaging!)

So I spent a little time watching the dosaging and discorging of Elephant Islands' latest 'Pink Elephant' Champagne. I quickly ran around and snapped some photos of things I'd need later for information for a painting, and one of the girls working on dosaging (adding cassis to the apple wine with the syringe) happily explained what they were doing. It looked like a pretty fun process and she explained it enthusiastically! I didn't want to be underfoot for too long, otherwise I would have paparrazi-ed the place. I love that Elephant Island is a small family run business and still do things in small scale assembly lines. (Love that machinery too!)

I love the wine puddles!! I didn't paint them in this time, but maybe next time!

1. The bottles are first hooked up to a machine which pumps them full for sparkling apple wine. Then the workers add cassis with the syringe- often through a funnel because the wine tends to bubble over when the cassis is added. This makes big wine puddles everywhere!

For some reason I think it's totally appropriate that Elephant Island uses pinkish coloured machines.

This is Del, Miranda's husband, manning the machine.

2. Next the bottle are corked on the big pink machine.

3. After the corking, another little machine adds the wires that will hold the champagne cork in place.

4. The corked bottle is shoved into the holes of the next tiny box machine to add the foil that will cover the wire and the cork.

5. The newly bottled Pink Elephant wine is placed into wine boxes to be sold to people like me!

I'm excited about doing reflections in water!

It looked like so much fun that I wanted to get on some boots and rubber gloves and just be part of the fun.

On a personal note, I love Elephant Island wine, which is entirely made of fruit. Not only does it taste amazing, it's completely different from grape wine, so I love the fun of it. The blackberry wine is amazing! The dessert wines are awesome. But Elephant Island uses fruit exclusively, so this Okanagan girl is excited that there are still plenty of orchards around Elephant Island so the cherry trees of my youth are still around! Yay fruit!

The three bottles of wine my friend Eric bought on a subsequent trip to Elephant Island.

This painting will be made into prints and will be available through Cafe Nevermatters and Elephant Island Winery once I am organised (by the end of this week!) I'lll update this blog once I have more information.

Thanks again, Miranda!

Link to All things

Elephant Island Winery

Until then, I am just getting everything organized for the Cafe NeverMatters show, which will be hung on July 1st or 2nd.

See you there!

xxMelanie

Kids in a Cherry Tree!

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Kids in an Okanagan Cherry Tree, April 2011. 11x14 " Ink on Paper

In preparation for the Cafe Nevermatters exhibition in Naramata this summer, I'm putting the Turkey sketches aside for a little while and focussing on Canadian/Okanagan themes. The next two paintings have to do with my childhood and growing up in Naramata (And arguably every childhood which has ever had the privilege of spending a little time in our idyllic little town.)

Since the painting is fairly orderly, I decided to add a little chaos with the birds- different colours, different angles, unlike the way I usually paint birds, orderly and in unison.

Summer for us really started when the summertime neighbours showed up. Grandchildren of Gramps who lived across the street, We'd spend the summers running around the beaches, jumping off the old train docks (which are sadly gone now) and stealing cherries and whatever fruit was in season for a quick free snack when we got hungry. We also stole fruit from the boxes at the packing house, which sadly met it's demise last week after being a landmark in Naramata since the 30's. But that's another story (and perhaps another painting!)

Reaching for that perfect cherry.One think I like about working with the transparency of the ink is that I was able to work that overlapping technique in the leaves successfully.

Strangely enough, I started out painting generic children, but as I progressed, the kids began to actually look like me, my sister, Tiffany Andrew and Billy- My sister actually pointed it out. It's funny how my subconcious can sneak into a painting from time to time! Undeniable!

Since the weather can still be chilly in cherry season (The first fruit of the year) The kids are in varying degrees of clothing. (The ones in shorts could be pushing the season!)

Though I will miss cherry season again this year (last year I was in the Emirates, this year I'll be in Vancouver, I think) I have enjoyed the frozen cherries my mom saved for me last year. There really is nothing like a fat juicy Okanagan cherry!

One thing we used to do is lay our beach towels on the ground and gently drop the cherries on it so we could take some to the beach. But often the cherries would burst upon hitting the towel, staining our lovely towels much to my mother's chagrin. (Come to think of it, it was probably the first form of natural dying for me!)

It comes as no surprise with the demise of the packing house that fruit is quickly being replaced with grapes for wine production, which is booming here in the Okanagan at the moment. But it's sad to see the fruit trees go; the Naramata Bench which is now famous for it's wineries were once a twenty minute drive of fresh spring blossoms, the first sign that spring had arrived. I think now there are really only two or three orchards that are in full blossom at the moment along the Naramata Road. The rest have been converted into vineyards already.

We also used to eat the cherries and spit the pits at each other. Kids will be kids!

The one downside of switching to vineyards is that we can't live off wine but we could live off fruit. But I can't blame a farmer in the Okanagan for wanting to make more money out of their crops. Being an Okanagan farmer can be a hard row to hoe, pun intended!

My sister says this little girl looks like me when I was young. But you couldn't catch me dead in a dress!

But I did have a bike similar to this (only blue).

Luckily there are wineries around such as Naramata owned and operated Elephant Island who make really delicious fruit wines. I was lucky enough to be invited by owner and operator Miranda Halliday to watch a discorging of Cassis and Apple sparkling wine/champagne yesterday. Mess, stained hands, wine puddles, machinery and rain gear. Melanie's painting subject heaven! Stay tuned for some fun drawing from my visit there in the coming weeks! It was super fun and I almost wished I worked in a winery for the sheer fun of it. Hell yeah, I could work a corking machine! And I've had the wine and it's extremely good.

And the ever loyal dog waiting for us to be finished and on our way for more kidly adventures in the Okanagan!

Now back to painting!

xxMelanie