Style Imitating Art | “Earth and Sky” by Paul Meltsner

Labor Day has come and gone but still we must labor on…

About Style Imitating Art

Style Imitating Art is hosted by Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey, Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge, and Marsha of Marsha in the Middle. Style Imitating Art challenges us to draw style inspiration from pieces of art. Every other Monday, one of the hosts, acting as presenter, selects an inspiration image that they will each post on their blogs. The following Monday, each host shares her art inspired outfit. Participants are invited to submit their art inspired outfits to the presenter by 10:00 p.m. EST on the Tuesday following the hosts’ art inspired outfit posts. The following day, Wednesday, the presenter will share all of the submissions on her blog.

You don’t have to be a blogger to join either! In fact, you don’t even have to join but you can still use the art to inspire an outfit just for the sake of trying something different. If you want to share your inspired outfit, we invite you do so on Instagram or any other social media platform that you prefer. Just be sure to tag Salazar, Shelbee, or Marsha or use #TeamLOTSStyle and #StyleImitatingArt so the hosts know you have joined. Go have some fun in your closets and join the SIA challenge next week!

This Week’s Presenter

It was my turn to choose our art inspiration. Because we celebrated Labor Day last Monday, I wanted to feature a piece that recognized good old fashioned hard work. After a quick Google search, I discovered the artwork of Paul Raphael Meltsner, an American artist who is widely recognized for his paintings from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era…perfect for some Labor Day inspiration!

The Artwork

“Earth and Sky” by Paul Meltsner

About the Artist: Paul Raphael Meltsner

Finding information about the artist and the artwork has proven to be much more challenging than creating an outfit for this week’s edition of Style Imitating Art. But I will share what I have been able to dig up.

Paul Raphael Meltsner was born to Jewish parents in 1905 in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. When he was just 8 years old, he sold his first painting for $25 to the Palestinian government. He attended the public elementary schools in Harlem before graduating from Flushing High School in Queens, New York, in 1922. After graduation, Meltsner went on to study at the National Academy of Design while producing illustrations for Coronet and Bachelor magazines.

Before the Great Depression, Meltsner was consistently selling his artwork and made a suitable income. In 1931, he moved into a two room studio apartment on the top floor of 240 West Fourteenth Street in New York City. For two years, he was financially stable, paying his rent in a timely manner and otherwise supporting himself on his artist’s income. By 1933, the 28-year-old Meltsner had become a nationally recognized artist with his work being exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States. However, as the depression era continued on, sales began to decline and Meltsner was unable to keep up with his rent. When the amount of overdue rent approached $200, an eviction notice was printed in the New York Times on May 17, 1933. On the morning of June 13, 1933, Meltsner was awakened by his landlord disguised as a City Marshall who was dumping his furniture, his paintings, and all of his other belongings into the street.

Following this very public and likely humiliating eviction, Meltsner got back on his feet by joining the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program sponsored by the Works Progress Administration which was meant to fund the visual arts in the United States. This program reportedly sustained around 10,000 independent artists and crafts people during the Great Depression and resulted in approximately 400,000 new works of art produced by WPA artists between 1935 and 1943.

As part of the Federal Art Project, Meltsner toured the United States in an old Ford, visiting farms and factories, and began creating paintings that represented the social realism that was popular among the early WPA artists. Working with oils on canvas, he created bold and bright depictions of simple yet iconic scenes of American workers and laborers. Meltsner could relate to the subjects of his paintings just as his subjects could relate to him, creating a perfectly harmonious balance in the work he produced.

In 1937, the Bellevue, Ohio, Post Office commissioned Meltsner to paint a mural. The large mural entitled Ohio depicts a heroic scene of factory workers and farmers laboring in their various workplaces and remains to this day as an exemplary specimen of award winning mural work.

That same year, Meltsner completed an oil painting called Paul, Marcella and Van Gogh which features the artist himself holding a hammer instead of a paintbrush, sitting beside his daughter with their wire fox terrier in the center. Behind them is the depiction of one of Meltsner’s WPA paintings. The original painting was purchased by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris but it was confiscated by the Nazis during the German occupation of France because Meltsner was Jewish. In 1940, Meltsner recreated the work, Paul, Marcella and Van Gogh (No. 2), which is housed at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, but is not currently on view.

During the WPA era, Meltsner also got into printmaking in an effort to stimulate public interest in print collecting. People identified with Meltsner’s working class motifs and as his work continued to celebrate the labor force, his lithographs became wildly popular collector’s items for both average working class folks as well as fine art museums. Later in his career, however, he shifted his interest away from WPA themes and focused on portraits of performing artists with the most famous of them depicting American dancer Martha Graham.

To benefit the Fifth War Loan Drive in 1944, Meltsner auctioned 8 portraits earning total proceeds of $2,715,000 for the cause (equivalent to $49,834,000 today when calculated for inflation). During his lifetime, many renowned people were collectors of Meltsner’s work including President Franklin D. Roosevelt who displayed his paintings in the White House. Today, many of Meltsner’s surviving works can be found in museums and galleries around the world.

Late in his life, Meltsner left New York City and retired to an artists’ colony in Woodstock, New York, where he had a barn studio and lived a simple life with no car or telephone. He died there in 1966 at the age of 61. It is unclear if he was ever married but we do know that he had a daughter named Marcella. Disappointingly, I could not find any other personal biographical information about him.

About the Art: “Earth and Sky”

Despite many online searches over the past week, I cannot find very much information about this painting except that it is an oil on canvas that was created in the 1930s and measures 24 x 30 in (61 x 76.2 cm).

Since the painting depicts American farm workers, I assume it was completed post-1935 after Meltsner joined the WPA’s Federal Art Project.

I was not familiar with Paul Meltsner or his artwork but I really do like the social realism combined with his bold colors depicting ordinary scenes of working class Americans. I believe that the working class is the support system of a nation and it should be respected, compensated, and celebrated as the necessary component that it is. Without a functioning and stable working class, entire nations could crumble.

About My Outfit

When I was deciding which painting by Paul Meltsner that I wanted to choose for our inspiration, I was torn between Earth and Sky and two very colorful paintings called American Landscape and Man Machine. I ultimately settled on Earth and Sky because I really like the more limited color palette. Sometimes when there are too many colors in a painting, I struggle with styling them because I get overwhelmed in my attempt to incorporate all the details and colors into one outfit. Another draw to this particular painting was the teal color of the farmer’s shirt because I wanted a reason to wear my teal cowgirl boots again. In the end, however, I swapped the teal boots for my old thrifted brown cowgirl boots.

I started with a new summer dress that features a print of teal and orange fronds sweeping across a dark blue background. The colors in the dress seemed to be an accurate representation of the general color palette of the painting plus the frond print sort of resembles the wheat field portrayed in the art.

I layered on an old kimono robe in rusty brown with a floral print that also features the same colors appearing in my dress as well as the painting. I know there aren’t any flowers depicted in the artwork, but I like the contrasting prints and the coordinating colors.

To represent the farmers themselves, I knew I was going to wear cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat, I just had to find the right pairing of boots and hat. As I stated above, my teal boots did not work as well as I wanted them to because the white design created too much contrast for my taste so I switched to my solid brown boots. My distressed cowgirl hat in navy blue is a recent acquisition and my jewelry includes my Shelbee mala beads, a flea market necklace and earrings, and a thrift store necklace with turquoise beads.

I liked this outfit so much that I wore it for three consecutive days including to my kids’ school orientations and open house events. It was the perfect combination of summer fabrics with autumnal vibes. As the warm weather is still hanging on around here, I am going to enjoy my summer clothing for as long as I possibly can!

I hope you have enjoyed this round of Style Imitating Art. If you want to play along and be featured with your own outfit inspired by this painting in my gallery post on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, be sure to submit your photos to me at shelbeeontheedge@gmail.com by 10:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, September 9, 2025. In the meantime, be sure to check out Salazar’s interpretation of Earth and Sky as well as Marsha’s take on it. 

Until then, happy styling, my friends!

Keeping it on the edge,

Shelbee