The dining room table of Melody Zahn Russell’s Hancock home is where she feels her most creative. It is well loved with tiny splotches of every color paint you could imagine dotting just about every inch and paint brushes of all shapes and sizes are within arms length. But it’s the natural surroundings just outside her windows, including large rocks and a wooded landscape that give her the most inspiration.
Art has always been Russell’s passion and it’s why she has made it her life’s work to foster that love for creativity in others. There are many days when Russell isn’t the only person set up with supplies around her dining room table working to generate a piece of work that not only expresses a passion for the arts, but works as a catalyst for healing.
“There’s nothing I’d rather be doing, nowhere I’d rather be,” Russell said. “I never really had to look for a job. I loved teaching.”
While Russell considers herself semi-retired, she spends a lot of her time with others on a variety of projects geared toward self growth, understanding and acceptance. For many years she has run Eggshell Studio with a motto of “hatch out the artist in you.”
She works with those who battle depression, have suffered a traumatic brain injury, fall on the autism spectrum or have suffered emotional pain after a defining moment in their life, including those at Four Winds Community in Temple every Wednesday. Some times it’s simply sitting side by side and painting together, while others it’s a collaborative effort to create art that helps work through some of life’s most difficult struggles.
“The hard things that harm us can usually turn into something good, but it takes time,” Russell said. “I believe we all heal ourselves when we’re ready and I like meeting those challenges.”
As a self-described pathological extrovert, Russell is drawn to people. She loves getting to know others and what makes them unique. She likes to think of each person as a representative of an animal species – infinitely different and special in their own way.
“The whole goal for life is to become yourself,” Russell said. “It’s proof of your own experiences.”
In the summer months, she hosts small weekly children’s art camps at her home under the name Miss Melody’s Summer Art Camp where she works with children mostly in the age ranges of 5 to 12. There’s a lot of storytelling and song with Polly the puppet and its really “kind of old fashioned playing and creating.”
“For me, my life is my art,” Russell said.
Russell studied education and sociology at the University of New Hampshire and went on to get her masters in early childhood education at the same Durham campus. But it was her three years at Emerson College in England that changed the way she viewed the educational process. She first learned about the school when founder Francis Edmunds came to talk at Pine Hill School during its first year of operation, where Russell was working as an assistant in the kindergarten program. She was fascinated by Edmunds’s philosophy on education and felt this pull to learn his ways.
It was also where she was first introduced to the expressive movement art known as eurythmy, created by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education.
“It’s not yoga, it’s not folk dance, it’s not gymnastics, it’s all of them combined,” Russell said. “Waldorf education is a huge part of my life. It’s my true love.”
While Russell never fulfilled her full immersion into eurythmy (something she said would happen in her next life), it’s always been near and dear to her heart. In order to fund her education in eurythmy, she started a business in the mid 1980s known as Mrs. Russell’s Potatoes when she was living in New York, where she created prints made using potato stamps and paint that she sold to anyone who would buy them. What started as a joke, turned into a successful endeavor that continues to this day.
“A lot of people know me as Mrs. Russell’s Potatoes,” she said.
In all seriousness, Russell believes she should have followed in the footsteps of Fred Rogers. She has that same friendly, caring and zany imagination that made Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood such an endearing memory for so many children. It’s how she likes to model her work with others.
It’s one of the many thoughts that has crept into her mind over the years – if only there was enough time in the day to see them all through to reality.
“I have a huge imagination – and too many ideas sometimes,” she said.
While her work has filled her life with so much satisfaction, nothing tops the moment she became a mother. She is so close with her only daughter Michelle, and the two share the family home in Hancock. Michelle is also an artist, which isn’t hard to see since she grew up around her mom teaching art around the dining room table.
Russell grew up in Milford and after leaving the state for a time, including a trip across Canada, down the west coast of the United States and into Mexico in a converted school bus with her life savings of $6,000 in search of a piece of land to embark of a self-sustaining lifestyle, she returned to the state for good in 1988.
“I wonder ‘why did I ever leave New Hampshire?’” she said.
In 2005, she and Michelle moved to Hancock because she wanted her only child to go to ConVal. She had looked at 15 schools around the state, but felt the regional high school in Peterborough was the best choice.
Even though Michelle graduated in 2007, the school and its success is still very important to Russell. It’s partly why she became so involved in the solar project that will be on the school district warrant next month – along with her quest to make the world a better and more sustainable place.
Doing what she can to help the environment has always been a big part of Russell’s life and with the issue of climate change a big concern in her house, she thinks any little change that people make can go a long way.
“Every day is a new day and things can get better,” Russell said.
Finding a way to approach life in a more green way, either on an individual or large scale, is something Russell strives to achieve with all her decisions.
She conceived the idea of the Grass Roots Cafe, which last met in December in Dublin with an evening of music and discussion as people talked about what kind of future they wanted to create. Russell has more ideas and has another meetup in the works.
Russell was very close to her father Bud and their connection was how Russell describes as profound. She likens herself to a female version of him.
“I was the recipient of huge love,” Russell said.
She wrote a small book about her experiences caring for her mother Anne and wants to write more. She also penned a chapter book called the Good Gardner about two children, Peter and Molly, who help an older villager that teaches life lessons along the way.
She also served as the illustrator for her friend Maggie Kemp’s book, “Sam, Fisherwoman”.
For Russell, everything she does goes back to her creative side. It’s what has guided her through life and she expects it to continue that way for many years to come.