With the ephemeral nature of street painting, Melanie also creates permanent works of Fine Art. She is a prolific Fine Artists, creating beautiful imagery in Oils and in Soft Pastel with such finesse and mastery that her Renaissance inspired figures dance off the canvas with whimsical charm. She has shown at prominent Southern California Galleries such as La Luz De Jesus, The Brewery, The 57 Underground, Spring Arts Collective, and Deborah Martin Gallery.

"Melanie Stimmell Van Latum's portraits pop with a hardboiled baroque, neo-noir coterie of haunting, flamboyant heroines. Handsome, sinister, and supremely confident women stare from the canvas with an imperiously mysterious gaze, clearly indicating that no cloister, boudoir, suburb or nursery could ever contain the canny power of their bodies and minds. Van Latum's cleverly balanced compositions and high-tension-line lighting conjure a triumphant, intelligent feminine charisma - a mise-en-scene flushed with dizzyingly endless decolletage and the intricate obsessions of coiffure. In playfully provoking erotic traditions, these post-traditionalist paintings resuscitate the vapid, gaping pin-up model to her proper stance as empress, saint, and icon." -Quintan Ana Wikswo

If that wasn't enough to keep her busy... In addition to her work as a professional street painter and Fine Artist, Melanie is also a strong supporter of Arts in Education and Therapy. On the Education Roster for the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Los Angeles Music Center, she has lead workshops and residencies in Italian Street Painting and Oil Painting, (the first elementary school oil painting class in Southern California) in elementary schools throughout Southern California. As part of her evolution through our current educational climate, Melanie developed a Collaborative Teaching Residency for a high school in South Central Los Angeles via the Los Angeles Music Center. A high risk school with root problems with gangs and drugs, she taught side by side with faculty to integrate the arts into their everyday curriculum. Using Street Painting as a vehicle, Melanie developed a 12 week program to aid teachers in engaging troubled teens within their Small Learning communities. When she began receiving requests for street painting workshops at schools in other states and countries, Melanie developed the Street Painting Academy, through which she offers students of all ages the opportunity to learn this 500 year old Italian tradition.