Michael D. Melet
Art
Worth Waiting For
By Peter Hinterman
Whenever 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 ba g 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 moment. It keeps me busy.”
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he pictures he dubs “waiting fors” happen spontaneously 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 begin, 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 Flint was bustling and his family was part of the reason why. They owned and operated the iconic Vogue Fashion Store on Saginaw St.
and young Michael couldn’t wait to contribute. “After I graduated high school in 1958, I was accepted to the University of Michigan,” he recalls.
I’m sticking with collage for now – although, I was thinking about going back to the beginning and working with watercolors and pen & ink. Take it back to my first show, so to speak. “I wanted to start working immediately but my father believed that everyone should have a college education and I couldn’t convince him otherwise.” However, after a stint working in New York’s garment district and his sophomore year at college, Melet was allowed to join his father and officially embrace Flint. He was given the reins of the business in 1972 and took it as far as he could, while at the same time serving on boards including Flint Institute of Arts and Buckham Gallery. It was while serving on the board for Buckham when a casual glance over his shoul-