About Melissa

I am a painter living in Western New York, creating in my home studio in our old 1870s farmhouse.  I enjoy a good cup of coffee, value deep conversation, and feel alive when I have a brush in my hand.  Most days you can find me doing life with my husband Jesse and with our children, Evelyn (age 7), Levi (age 5), and Selah (age 2).  I believe that beauty is a gift from the Creator and seek to enjoy and surround myself with the beauty of nature. 

Although I have always loved to create and I took a beginner painting class in college, I didn’t begin to seriously explore painting until a few years later as I was finishing up a graduate degree in higher education and counseling. I was gifted an online art course, Creatively Made, by teacher and artist Jeanne Oliver. This class awakened something in me. I felt so alive when I was creating! I have not stopped painting since 2013 and now could not imagine my life without it.

I am deeply inspired by nature. So many small and seemingly insignificant elements in nature are breathtakingly lovely and have a part to play in the grand beauty of the earth: a blade of grass, or a flower's single petal; flowers budding so soon after the long dead of winter; the chaos of a thunderstorm that makes things grow.  Nature reminds me daily that mundane moments have a purpose, chaotic moments are not mistakes, and single details contain great significance.

I believe that life is a beautiful gift. I also feel the presence of brokenness and suffering in our world and the tension this produces. Painting allows me to express my desire to see goodness and beauty break through the dark and to communicate hope through each brush stroke.  I am often struck by the reality that in spite of all that can go wrong in the world, some things can go so right and there is still a beautiful story being told.

Through my work I hope to inspire you to see beauty in the unfolding moments of life. There is something deeply hopeful about the way a single flower petal seems insignificant until viewed with other petals as part of a greater beauty.  Similarly, moments of our own lives, when observed as part of a greater whole, tell a beautiful story.

Thank you for following along with me on this journey.