Matt Schweikhardt’s wife, Melanie, passed away in 2023, but her art lives on, giving joy and raising money to fight cancer.
Schweikhardt, who lives at Heritage Pointe of Warren senior living community, is continuing his wife’s legacy of fostering beauty in the world around her by creating notecards featuring her watercolor paintings.
The cards are being sold on the website www.MelaniesOriginalWatercolors.com to benefit the Foundation for Women’s Cancer.
Melanie, a mother of two grown daughters and grandmother of six, was a self-taught artist who
used her paintbrush to depict colorful florals and landscapes.
“It gave her joy to create beautiful things, because her motto in life was to make the things around her more beautiful,” he says.
Melanie, who had suffered from primary peritoneal cancer, was modest about her talent for creating vividly colored watercolors.
“She was a bit shy,” he says. “She mostly gave her artwork to family and friends. But she always thought that creating greeting cards from her artwork would be better than wall art.”
Shortly before she died, Schweikhardt says his wife gave him her blessing to do something with her artwork as long as the profits would go to charity.
Schweikhardt hired a designer to create the website where the cards are sold. It launched in October 2024.
The cards are currently priced at $10 for a package of 10 cards.
“We are learning as we go. It’s not set in stone what we are doing,” says Schweikhardt about the process of selling the cards.
It’s an entirely new experience for Schweikhardt who retired from his career as an insurance agent after Melanie got ill.
“I said, ‘I am not going to hand her off for someone else to take care of, I am going to care for her,” he recalls.
Over her time developing as an artist—about ten years—Melanie created about 100 paintings and fostered a style that was distinctively her own, he says.
“Her colors are very bright and vivid,” he says. “And when we zoom them down to fit the greeting cards, the resolution is great.”
He says she developed her style “just by trial and error and research.”
The effort to create the greeting cards “has been bittersweet,” for Schweikhardt who nonetheless
believes that Melanie would be happy to know that her work is doing what she always did in life—spreading hope and beauty.
“I think she’d be pleased,” he says.
