IT’S not quite what she bargained for. Straddling herself on a sky lift in the pouring rain, Melanie Bayoud puts her inimitable markings on to the concrete wall in front of her.
“I was sketching the outline of a bird,” she says, grinning, regaling me in her humorous candour that it literally “peed” with rain. Her artwork was for a newly minted hotel in Melaka called The Nest House — a collaboration that she’s literally bubbling with excitement about. The Nest House marks Bayoud’s first-time collaboration in designing a hotel space.
“All the artworks, the interiors, the furnishings, the exterior murals, colour choices come from a creative perspective — mine — and I’m so excited about it!” she says, beaming. Drawing the giant bird image on the outside, she continues, was quite an adventure.
“We put up a projector to beam the outline onto the wall,” she relates gaily, telling me that it was balanced on top of a garbage bin across the road, with three people huddled over it, holding umbrellas while she careened across the night skies to quickly sketch on the outline beamed by the projector.
“There are two things I’m really terrified of — birds and heights!” she confides. And it all came together in the form of a project that required her to both draw a six-metre by four-metre bird on the side of the hotel, teetering atop a sky lift in the rain. “My knees were literally shaking!” she exclaims, laughing heartily. “Sometimes, you just have to go ahead and face your fears.”
Laughter comes easy to the animated 56-year-old British-born artist. Her blue eyes framed by a pair of fashionable glasses crinkle in humour as she proudly shows off her stationery stash. “One can never have too many pens,” she quips, whipping out her colour pencils encased in a soft cloth wrap. “I made it myself,” she adds proudly.
She takes centrestage in her workroom — a cosy cubbyhole with shelves brimming with ink bottles, art papers, files, books, (tonnes of) pens — and laughs raucously when I comment on how small the room is. “It’s spacious compared to a Hong Kong apartment, you know!”
Known for her monochrome-patterned imageries done in “...98 per cent Indian ink”, Bayoud shimmies over to a shelf, rummages through it and shows me a bottle, before settling back into her seat again.
There’s music playing in the background, her tiny little enclave is brightly lit and tastefully cluttered with enough artist tools and bric-a-brac to bring out the latent creativity in just about anyone.
Her framed artworks are displayed throughout her spacious KL condominium. In her own working space, her drawings are everywhere — tucked away carefully in files, printed on magnets stuck around her desktop computer, half-drawn unfinished pieces piled on the side and breathtaking pieces hung on her white walls showcasing richly patterned elephant images, hornbills, the iconic twin towers, owls with spread wings and many more.
They’re so intricately done with tiny dots, swirls, spheres that I wonder aloud as to how long she takes to complete these pieces. “Oh this elephant took me about 36 hours,” she responds glibly pointing to a piece. Thirty six hours? She laughs yet again at the expression on my face.
NURSING ARTISTIC DREAMS
“I’ve been drawing ever since I could learn how to hold a pencil,” she declares, adding: “On my mother’s curtains, on napkins, on tablecloths, on everything! I was always drawing.” She was an active child, she explains, but when she started drawing, “...it sent me off into another world.”
But back in the 1970s, art school wasn’t de rigueur for most conventional parents. “It wasn’t an option for me where my parents were concerned,” reveals the Newcastle native candidly. She was encouraged to take up nursing because there was “no career in art”.
So she headed off to London to take up nursing. It wasn’t quite the right ‘fit’ as Bayoud discovered. She enjoyed spending her time talking to patients but her supervisor had different ideas. Laughing, she recounts: “I got told off by the matron. ‘General nursing isn’t for you!’ she said. ‘You talk too much. Go and study psychiatry!’”
Undeterred, Bayoud took her matron’s stern advice and enrolled herself in a nursing psychiatry course. She soon found work as a nurse specialising in mother/baby bonding, post-natal depression eating disorders and emotional crisis care.
Dealing with patients with these issues got her falling back on her art in an effort to reach out to them.
Art therapy was literally unheard of back then, but is proving more popular these days among those who ordinarily find the idea of articulating their mental health issues through words daunting and frustrating.
For these people, Bayoud attests, art can provide a less confronting conduit to express themselves.
“I taught patients to draw lines and circles. These meditative repetitive drawings calmed them down. They were using less medication, had less outbursts and were sleeping better,” she recalls.
“I realised that there’s something in this,” she says, adding that she delved into it further and even studied under an art therapist. “I loved nursing, and art was my inherent passion. I asked myself: What could I do to bring my two loves together?” The answer was easy enough: Bayoud soon developed a series of art therapy workshops called ‘Thinking With Ink’.
RELEASING ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS
‘Thinking with Ink’ goes beyond the standard art therapy class. The four-hour programme begins with an explanation of what stress does to a person physically and physiologically.
“It provides techniques on how you can actively control your stress, teaches you how you can stimulate both your left and right brain by doing certain exercises, and we throw in a number of brain games!” she says, pausing for maximum effect before announcing with a flourish: “And then we draw!”
Creativity is unleashed during these sessions, she says, eyes twinkling. For many people, words aren’t enough to express the way they feel. That’s where Bayoud’s brand of therapy comes in — the practice of using art as a movement to communicate thoughts, feelings, trauma and experiences where words fail. As she’d attest, throwing paint on to a blank canvas can be cathartic.
She relates the story of a grieving mother — who had lost her 27-year-old daughter in an accident eight years ago — who attended one of her workshops called “Expressive Canvas” in the South of France last year. The well-coiffed participant was unable to move on from her daughter’s death and had isolated herself in grief. She was reluctant to participate at first.
“It’s a messy affair. I tell participants to come with old clothes and to be prepared to use their whole bodies to paint onto a huge 1.5 square metre canvas.”
The methodology is simple: Choose three base colours, sit in pairs, get blindfolded and have your partner help you pick out your first colour which you are to put on the canvas.
“You can roll around the canvas, step on it to slather the paint. That helps to get all the emotions out. You’re blindfolded and you’re literally painting and giving vent to your pent-up emotions. After you’re done with the first colour, you proceed with the other two colours of your choosing,” she explains, adding: “The release is amazing. There are a lot of screaming, crying, laughter going on while people are having a go at the canvas guided by their partners.”
The woman, she tells me, finally agreed to participate. In her prim Moschino pants, she got down on her knees to start painting. Blindfolded, she wept and wept as she slathered the red paint on to the blank canvas.
“She was sweating and crying, expelling a lot of energy as she filled the canvas with red. ‘It’s the colour of my daughter’s blood,’ she said,” recalls Bayoud softly. Then, she chose a beautiful turquoise to paint over the red coupled with flecks of white.
“It was beautiful,” continues Bayoud. “At the end, there was just this slightest trace of red left on the canvas. ‘Enough. I’m done,’ the woman said. Her grieving had drawn to an end.” The mother took the painting home, and went on to paint on her own ever since.
“She told me that the session helped her move on with her life,” remarks Bayoud quietly. Pausing to take a sip of water, she adds: “Her story really touched me. I still get shivers talking about her today.”
UNLEASHING ARTISTIC PASSIONS
The emotional moment fades away, and her sparkle returns. The artist has been doing so much — from art therapy workshops, merchandising (her inimitable art is printed on anything from magnets, T-shirts to umbrellas), putting her prints on walls of hotel buildings and wellness centres, collaborations in designing living spaces like The Nest House and running art projects for the underprivileged (she once taught Cambodian mothers to crotchet using recycled materials like plastic).
“I’m a can-do person,” she asserts, adding: “I don’t take no for an answer. If someone says you can’t do it, I say I can!”
She attributes her positivity to her husband, Mark Bayoud, an Australian of Lebanese descent whom she met while they were back in Australia, where she was working as a nurse. Leaning forward, she suddenly inquires: “Did you meet Mark earlier downstairs?” Without waiting for an answer, she smiles widely, declaring: “He’s the love of my life!”
She reveals that she met him while she was a still a single mother of three young children. “It was through a blind date. through the newspapers!” she crows triumphantly, breaking into laughter. “Before Tinder and online dating, that was also the role of the newspapers! I mean, this was 25 years ago!”
He’s been her cheerleader and firm believer in her capabilities. “He often tells me: ‘Melanie, you can do anything you set your mind to,’” she says. “He takes any stumbling or hesitation I have, and builds that bridge for me to get across it.”
Her eyes soften as she adds: “He supports everything I do. I’m just emboldened by the faith he has in me. I feel I can practically do anything with that confidence he gives me.”
As if on cue, her husband walks up to remind her that it’s almost time to leave. She’s off to Melaka to bring her son who’s visiting, to see her latest triumph — The Nest House. “It’s all about living life to the fullest. I’m incredibly grateful that I get to do what I love and am brave enough to accomplish bigger and more challenging projects,” she confides.
Aren’t you afraid that you might fail? I ask. “Fail?” she repeats half-incredulously before answering: “There are plenty of things I’ve failed at. Failing is part of growing.”
Easy laughter rolls off her again as she tells me of the one time she used the wrong type of paint to redecorate her husband’s office. “I picked the wrong colours. But here’s the thing.” she says, pausing as her eyes dance behind her spectacles.
Leaning forward towards me, she stage-whispers as if revealing a big secret: “I got to pick another colour and paint over it!” More laughter ensues before she concludes smiling: “Anything can be painted over. It can be restarted and redone. Like life!”