About the Artist

MELISSA SHELLY

The visual arts have always been a part of Melissa Shelly’s life. Creating art, particularly oil painting, and more recently mixed media art, is a fascinating, truth-finding and stabilizing experience for her. Her background includes acting, dance, yoga, interior design, and work as a practicing psychologist. 

With strong training in the tenets of classical realism, Melissa painted representational oil paintings for many years until she felt the need to breath new life into her work. This led her to take time off from showing her work to raise her son while spending time searching for her true voice. “I’ve become less interested in accurate representation of what I see before me and more concerned with abstracting the figure or landscape in response to the relationships found on canvas. Working abstractly allows me to tap into a more immediate personal response. It comes from a desire to capture fleeting effects and momentary observations through perceived design armatures and color harmonies.” Since most art lies somewhere along the continuum between abstraction and representation, it is often difficult to know where one rubric ends and the other continues. For Melissa, it has more to do with the emotional connection she has with the work and its authenticity. Her background in interior design and psychology has informed her design intuition allowing her to tap into unconscious feelings that she translates to the canvas.

“I appreciate beautiful rooms, objects and surroundings, the landscape, cinema, music and fashion as a means of expression. I am courageously living the richest life I could have imagined.” 

Melissa lives and works in Manhattan. She has a son and two Maine Coon cats.