MELISSA SMITH Biography
I paint my landscapes plein-air, working outdoors with my dog to capture the extended panoramic views of south Louisiana and coastal Mississippi. I fell in love with the outdoors while growing
up in the rolling hills of central North Carolina and began painting landscapes in the rolling hills near Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts where I attended college. When I moved to New
Orleans in 1987 for graduate school in painting at Tulane University, I was stunned by the lush flat landscapes of south Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf coast. I’ve never lost that
feeling.
At Tulane I began to experiment with long narrow paintings. Soon the paintings were becoming even longer and narrower to create a panoramic feeling. I seek remote and quiet spots, where I am moved by how the natural beauty is balanced by desolation and fragility. I have a profound need to experience this edgy mix of beauty and desolation directly. Working plein-air I see the subtle relationships of light, sky, and water with trees, marsh and fields. All paintings are completed on site: My car and my pontoon boat are my studios.
Shortly before Katrina, I began playing with the idea of breaking the paintings apart. In a panoramic view, it is not unusual for one end of the view to be beautifully lit, while the other end, might look better at a different time of day. How could I incorporate different times of day into the same painting? I developed the idea of cutting a long painting of one view into parts, painting the parts at different times, then reassembling the picture. I depend entirely upon the under drawing to hold the work together. These segments allow me to incorporate time into the work, as a painting can now contain different times of day and types of weather.
I studied painting at Mount Holyoke College, where I received my undergraduate degree. I obtained an MFA from Tulane where I taught painting and drawing for nearly ten years. My work is included in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Lauren Rogers Museum in Laurel, Mississippi. I currently paint in and around Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
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