about the artist
Melissa Kemper Westbrook is a long-time resident of Atlanta, where she shares a home with a husband she is crazy about and their four fun and wild young sons. She spent the first fifteen years of her career teaching high school English, drama, and yearbook.
Just weeks before the pandemic began, she gave birth to her youngest child. Since then, she has been home wrangling the little guys while her husband has been in the basement working full time as a therapist and finishing his doctoral dissertation.
To help her cope with the stresses of pandemic parenting, Melissa picked up a set of her son's Crayola watercolors and started painting in between diaper changes, skinned knees, and grilled cheeses. Much of her work has been created to a soundtrack of "MOMMMMM" and fraternal bickering.
The death of Melissa's beloved father in November 2020 was devastating, and she uses her art and poetry to express her grief and gratitude for him. His name was Dan Kemper, and he was a man of uncommon goodness.
In the summer of 2021, she decided to start working in earnest towards a creative career and is now selling her prints, taking commissions, leading creativity workshops, and continuing to work on that novel she started approximately 500 years ago. She was honored to be featured as one of Atlanta’s Top 50 Artists on Find the Artists in the summer of 2022.
Upcoming workshops include: Creativity for Moms; The Artist's Way; Art+Expression for the Grieving; and Easy Art Nights For Fun Where No-one Will Judge You Even If Your Art Looks Dumb. Follow her creative process on Instagram @m.kemper.westbrook or drop her a note at m.kemper.westbrook@gmail.com.