In the Vertex series, the artist literally deconstructs a rainbow of pencils to make paintings, using both the colour-edged wooden shavings and the granular sharpenings of pencil pigment. While painstaking, this innovative, process-based approach produces visually spectacular results. The six works in this series are on circular, elliptical and pointed-elliptical supports.

Each shaving has been meticulously affixed to the support to build up patterns that recall bird plumage. The sharpenings have been applied in a freer but no less time-consuming manner to create lyrically abstract ‘colour maps’ of pure and blended pigments, reminiscent in parts of hundreds-and-thousands.

The delicate shavings of wood add their own champagne-coloured tints to the visual mix, while the tiny bands of colour around each (taken from the identifying colour on the outside of each pencil) are variously shaped like fans, squiggles and zigzags. Vertex sees Melamed breathe new life into waste material.