My City January 2023

MYARTS

Michael D. Melet Art Worth Waiting For

BY PETER HINTERMAN

W henever and wherever you meet Michael D. Melet, you can be sure of two things: 1) He’s got something special in the works, and 2) In his coat pocket or his bag is a small sketchbook and a pencil – his steady traveling companions. “I take a pad of paper with me and I draw every day,” he states. “I draw what I see at the mo ment. It keeps me busy.”The pictures he dubs “waiting fors” happen sponta neously whenever he sees something

that piques his interest, usually during the quiet periods when he is waiting for something else such as picking up a grandchild, waiting for a meeting to be gin, or a show to start. His sketchbook contains images such as a man at a piano, the back of heads in an audience, a piece of scenery, etc.The drawings are simple but it was one of these “waiting fors” that led him to his second career as an artist and his first exhibition at Buckham Gallery in 2011.

Born and raised in Flint, Melet attended Cook, Longfellow and Zimmerman schools until finishing high school at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills. After graduating, it was always his goal to work with his father in fashion back in the city of his birth. In Melet’s youth, Downtown

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