Melanie Thorn - Potten
Melanie is an acrylic artist based in the Cotswolds, working in an impressionistic style that celebrates the quiet beauty and emotional depth of the natural world—land, sea, and sky.
Melanie's Her paintings are rooted in a deep sensitivity to atmosphere and place, capturing shifting light, weather, and form through layered textures and expressive, intuitive brushwork. Melanie is particularly drawn to the landscapes around her home town of Moreton-in-Marsh and the coastlines of Devon and Cornwall. The rolling Cotswold countryside and the dramatic coastal scenery of the South West both feature prominently in her practice, each offering its own interplay of light, space, and the passage of time. Sweeping fields, wooded hillsides, and village rooftops sit alongside coastal towns, working harbours, and estuary inlets — all feeding into her evolving exploration of landscape and memory, where tidal rhythms, reflective surfaces, and the soft geometry of boats and shorelines meet the quieter textures of the inland world. She works predominantly from her home studio, sketching on location and photographing scenes to build the visual material that informs each new composition, though she occasionally enjoys painting en plein air.
Melanie draws inspiration from contemporary landscape painters such as David Tress, John Hammond, and Matthew Alexander, as well as the great masters of landscape art including J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Claude Monet.
She earned her BA in Fine Art from the University of Gloucestershire in 2008, followed by a Master’s degree in Urban Design at Birmingham City University in 2009. This academic background continues to inform her work, underpinning a strong sense of composition, spatial awareness, and the relationship between built and natural environments.
Her work received early recognition when she won the under-25s category at the Broadway Arts Festival Open Art Competition. She has exhibited widely across Gloucestershire and Worcestershire and was featured as a Wildcard artist on Sky Arts’ Landscape Artist of the Year in 2021 (Series 7).
In 2023, she was selected as a finalist for the Broadway Arts Festival Open Art Exhibition and returned to Landscape Artist of the Year in 2024 (Series 9), where she won her Wildcard heat at Liverpool Waterfront. In July 2024, she held a private exhibition, Unfolding Landscapes, at Sixteen Gallery, Cheltenham, showcasing a body of work inspired by both inland and coastal environments.
Her recent achievements include the selection of Place des Lices for the RBSA Summer Show 2024, Airing in the Breeze for the Bath Society of Artists Exhibition 2024, and Dappled Shade, Aix en Provence for the Broadway Arts Festival 2025.