Forage to Fossil

Artist Bio

Melissa Mulder currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario and works full time from her home studio. Her first life was that of one surrounded by flowers. The scent, life span, colour, variety, fragility and painterly qualities of flowers were something she studied intimately by way of formal education (Humber College: Etobicoke Canada, Blom Masters Program: Gouda, Netherlands) and by more than 25 years of working with flowers. One would say that she painted with petals, which has now evolved to her current form as a Relief/Fresco-Secco-esque Watercolour Artist which completes the need to continue the relationship she has with the flowering world.

Melissa focusses her artwork practice on elements and atmospheric exploration of the natural world. Realism is not her goal, her goal is to capture what created it (the flowers, the mountains, the trees, the clouds) Melissa’s continuing development of her work sees her push past simple singular impressions to capture an aura of full familiar land and floralscapes with shallow reliefs in plaster, her medium of choice, where she can bring in the dimensional characteristics and organic components of her subject, creating impressionist tactile wall art brought to life with vivid colour.

  Her Fresco-Secco paintings are rendered in a combination of textural relief impressions and careful marks, combined with loose flowing movement of watercolour. Often representing natural environments reminiscent of Canadian landscapes, or garden grandeur, her dance between capturing physical detail and environmental essence offers an engaging duality for the viewer.

Melissa art has collectors in the UK, the USA and throughout Canada. Her work can also be viewed in person at The Art Gallery of Guelph, by appointment at her home studio and here on her website @foragetofossil.com

Artist Statement

Perhaps it is the allure of capturing and holding indefinitely all of those delicately delicious fleeting flowers we longed to be able to offer our floral lovers regardless of season. Or the wildness of uncultivated beauty in imperfect forest fern or toppled secret gardens left to wander on their own for too long. Boring are the tall and perfectly straight, bring me the botanically bent, the ones that stretch and creep longing for the sunshine.  Now, let’s not just paint the flowers but let’s coax out what shaped them in to what they have become, now that is what thrills me.

While flowers are my muse it is the unique essence of the subject that draws me in. Flowing transparent watercolour over, around and between the convex impressions, with highlights of chalky opaque veins, embellishments of carving, scratching and sanding helping to depict what a flower might feel and experience in its environment rather than what they merely look like.

I am inspired by the elemental struggle of the floral life cycle. From greenhouse seedling or delicate wild unfurling fiddlehead, through it’s first exposure to breeching the hard ground, learning the harshness of sun, the depth of cool nights and the thrist enduced by drying winds. It begins to cope by rooting down and wide seeking the strength of that which is around it, be it rock, mycelium or woody stem of the pesky weed. A battle for survival and the quest to replicate and grow if even by crawling along the ground, winding itself through an invasive adversary.

Once the relief is cleaned of clay I work fast to flood a toning colour layer over the surface. The pigment embedding itself deep in to the pores of the gypsum. Layer after fine layer, lending depth and delicacy as the colour dances over the surface, until it is pulled in and resting comfortably into the space it gravitated too. Weaving between translucent and opaque colours I attempt to build what might be “a day in the life” of the captured subject.  I move the pigments around and over top of the relief details, knowing the convex and jutting nature and the inevitable shadow play of daylight once hung (in its rightful place) is what makes the artworks heart beat.