An outstretched hand. Contrasting blue and red brushstrokes. A tensed brow. These are the recurring, evocative characteristics of New York-based Melissa Schainker’s artwork, which she creates to encourage others to explore their own emotional landscapes and to discuss her experience with mental illness.
“I want my art to help people see what emotions they’ve buried,” Schainker said. Schainker is a professionally trained fine artist whose visceral, surrealist figure paintings have shared mural and gallery wall space with members of the New York City street art scene since 2017.
“I am someone who overthinks everything and will bury my feelings. I draw it out later and make sense of it. Art is a means for me to figure out what the hell is going on. It’s kind of backwards but that’s how my brain is wired.”
But her art career extends much farther into the past than that—she’s been creating oil paintings for more than 25 years and has shown in exhibitions all over the United States, as well as Italy, and England. Her paintings have also found homes with art collectors all over the world.
Locally, Schainker has painted walls for the Queens Arts Festival, the TMJ Arts Collective in SoHo, the First Street Green Art Park, a skatepark in Long Island and a collaboration with Android Oi at Underhill Walls.
What viewers respond to in Schainker’s that she uses dramatic colors and dramatic close-ups of the most expressive parts of the human body, like a pulsing eye vein or a strained hand tendon to discuss her relationship with her anxiety diagnosis. Looking at one of her paintings feels voyeuristic—like observing the inside walls of someone’s mind. “I am someone who overthinks everything and will bury my feelings,” Schainker said. “I draw it out later and make sense of it. Art is a means for me to figure out what the hell is going on. It’s kind of backwards but that’s how my brain is wired.”
She created her first oil painting at age 12 of a scene of New York City. Her interest in art persisted and after a full scholarship to art school, she established her career in the arts working at non-profits’ art departments before making her own artwork her full-time gig. She describes her work as “figurative surrealism” because she portrays distorted human figures and combines imaginative elements in her anatomical body renderings, like a clock embedded in a forearm or a hand bursting out of a sternum.
“When I’m using hands in a piece, it’s to tell the honest situation and when I’m using eyes, it’s to kind of cover up what’s actually going on.”
She said her paintings place an emphasis on hand gestures because she believes those are more revealing of someone’s interiority than the eyes. “When I’m using hands in a piece, it’s to tell the honest situation and when i’m using eyes, it’s to kind of cover up what’s actually going on,” Schainker said. “I’ve noticed that people’s hand gestures are incredibly telling. The eyes are not always the window to the soul that people think.”
Though her work includes a full spectrum of crimson reds and bodies in various distorted states, some painful, Schainker said that her paintings are not about violence at all. “What I’m trying to convey in my pieces is not nessecarily a sense of violence but a sense of drama and balance and sometimes color for color’s sake,” Schainker said. “I intentionally distort figures and use colors that are kind of jarring to get an emotional response from people. I think societally, we kind of suck about saying what we really feel and I think that there’s a tend to not embrace darkness and light because they’re both a productive means of getting out emotions. I think it’s important to look at all sides of life, not just the rosy ones.”
“I intentionally distort figures and use colors that are kind of jarring to get an emotional response from people. I think societally, we kind of suck about saying what we really feel and I think that there’s a tend to not embrace darkness and light because they’re both a productive means of getting out emotions. I think it’s important to look at all sides of life, not just the rosy ones.”
While Schainker primarily creates complex, darker work, she doesn’t shy away from lighter ones, creating rainbows and bursts of color that show an element of hope or joy. Whether painting deep pain or soaring joy, Schainker’s work retains an honesty that shines through her canvases.
