Tipsy Melaard (b. 1981, Faroe Islands) is an abstract painter whose work explores the fluid boundaries between land, memory, and perception. Working primarily in acrylics and, more recently, spray paint on raw canvas, Melaard’s practice is rooted in a lifelong resistance to fixed forms—visual, conceptual, and social. In his world, neither lines nor labels stay still for long.
Born and raised on the remote Faroe Islands, Melaard developed an early sensitivity to shifting atmospheres. The landscape that surrounded him was never cleanly outlined or sharply defined. Mist, sea, and stone blurred into one another, making it difficult to tell where sky ended and land began. “When I looked at landscapes as a child,” Tipsy recalls, “they were already abstract. So abstraction never felt like a choice - it was just how I experienced the world.”
This innate sense of ambiguity has carried through Melaard’s evolving body of work. After moving to Germany in the early 2000s, he self trained in painting in Berlin. Between 2006 and 2012, he lived and worked in Berlin, where his style matured in parallel with an ever-growing desire to strip away narrative and form. Though he mostly kept to himself and never aligned with any particular artistic movement or identity politics, his work from this period began to reject the figurative altogether, treating the canvas as a place where things could disappear as easily as they appear.
Today, Melaard lives in the south of Italy, surrounded once again by a landscape of quiet instability - terraced hills, eroded cliffs, and shimmering light. His recent paintings return to the theme of landscape, not as representation, but as sensation: wind patterns, weather traces, memory layers. On raw canvases, he plays with sweeping gestures, bleached fields of color, and eruptions of spray paint to evoke the feeling of terrain rather than its image. To him, landscape is as much an internal event as an external one.