Art with a French twist

Alicia Robinson

Bicyclists wave to shopkeepers as they navigate the slow-moving

traffic on a street packed with tiny, gaily decorated stores. The

scene could be an avenue in a French town, but it’s also what artist

Holly Wojahn sees when she looks out the window of her Balboa Island

shop.

Wojahn opened Melange, an art gallery and gift shop, last month in

a cozy space on Balboa Island’s Marine Avenue. She sells her original

paintings as well as reproductions of them on greeting cards. She

also offers items she’s decorated such as trays and watering cans,

and gift items she imports from France.

“I liked the idea of having sort of a fine art gallery but that

didn’t feel so serious and so uptight,” Wojahn said.

It’s hard to feel uptight in Melange, with its lemon-colored

walls, blue-painted doorframes and the rainbow of merchandise

arranged to attract the eye.

Wojahn’s bright, cheery store is a perfect example of the unique

shops on the island that are a far cry from the same old stores found

in a mall, said Caryn Kallal, a clerk in Shirley’s Heart, a home and

garden accessories retailer next door to Melange.

“Obviously we care a lot what goes next door,” she said.

“[Melange] actually fits in really well with what we’ve got going

here.”

A self-taught painter who grew up in Huntington Beach, Wojahn knew

very clearly from a young age that she wanted to make her living as

an artist. She studied art in college and 16 years ago she ran

another shop on Balboa Island, the Secret Room and Tea Garden,

selling items she painted.

When she got divorced 10 years ago she moved with the kids to

Paris and began concentrating on her painting career, inspired by the

colorful street scenes and the city’s Picasso Museum. Later, when her

children came back to Newport Beach, she began commuting. She now

spends about half the year in Paris, where she is represented by

Galerie Breheret, the oldest gallery in Paris, which sits opposite

the Louvre.

Various U.S. galleries also sell her work, which has been

described as colorist and expressionist. She uses vivid hues in her

paintings, which include French street scenes and interiors, such as

a room full of disarrayed chairs and books and a kicked-off shoe,

that have earned her comparisons to Henri Matisse.

“You don’t choose your style,” Wojahn said. “It’s sort of inherent

in you if you’re really honest as an artist.”

But she also makes her art accessible by offering smaller 12-inch

square paintings that bear uplifting sayings of her own invention.

“When life seems colorless, stand in a flowerbed,” is one example.

“Fine art isn’t for everybody,” Wojahn said. “Not everybody’s

going to walk into a gallery and drop $2,500 on a painting, but

[they] would like to own a piece of work by the artist.”

While she still has moments of trepidation about when her next

painting will sell, for now she’s enjoying running the shop, and

customers have shown their approval, she said.

“People are really, really getting it,” she said.