STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Melissa Graves Brown stands over a 7-by-3-foot painting with a three-inch brush and begins flicking her wrist.
She drips and she dribbles, letting paint flecks fall like leaves--where they may. Melissa creates a little foliage on the outline of one tree by squirting water through her brush. She blots the watery paint with a paper towel. And, then, Brown picks up the canvas and jiggles it around.
When she’s finished, an array of aspen trees have come to life, their leaves popping off the canvas with bedazzling color.
Melissa Graves Brown’s paintings are unmistakable, thanks to what she calls “controlled splattering.”
“I like to bring color and light to people, particularly in hospital or residential care facilities where many of my paintings hang,” said Brown, whose work hangs in care centers from North Carolina to Washington and from New York to California. “I want to transport people into a more positive place. And I want it to be as interesting up close as far away.”
Brown’s unique take on trees, plus a new body of work featuring winter scenes and what she calls “the grand Idaho sky and foothills” will be on display this weekend at the 49th annual Sun Valley Center Arts & Crafts Festival.
The festival, which brings together 130 artists selected through a rigorous jury process, will be held in Ketchum’s Atkinsons’ Park today through Sunday, Aug. 13.
Brown became enamored with color, snorkeling amidst the once-vibrantly colored coral reefs in the Florida Keys where she grew up.
“My husband Christopher grew up in New York where it was grey—there was no color. Perhaps, that why he does black and white pencil drawings,” she noted.
Although she got a Master of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania, painting turned out to be the hardest thing she’d ever tried to do.
“I took it on wholeheartedly and found that it was not the end but the process I loved—pushing around washes and all that. That’s where it dawned on me to bring color and light into people’s lives and environment.”
Brown and her husband came to the Wood River Valley in 1998 at the encouragement of friends who told them they’d found a little mountain town with a world-class ski mountain and a thriving art market.
And the aspen groves that colored the mountain slopes alongside the dark Douglas fir and lodgepole pine became her focal point.
“While trees appear to be my subject, I’m really driven by color,” she said.
A couple days before this weekend’s show, the 800-square foot studio Brown shares with her husband in Hailey’s industrial district takes on the appearance of an assembly line as she moves from one canvas to another splattering paint.
She lathers three or four layers of gesso on a blank canvas and sands it, coloring in the sky and foreground with four washes. Then she takes up the brush and begins splattering purple to add contrast, some of it falling on her apron and the cement floor.
Brown came up with the splatter technique on her own.
“I’m not a detail person. I don’t draw,” she said. “Watching the wind lift from the trees and swirl around me was a pivotal moment. I thought it would be so wonderful if I could capture that sense of motion. And I think I have the way the leaves seem to fall in between the trees. They just seem to take on a life of their own.”
In addition to her trademark paintings, Brown will be presenting a new line of work at this weekend’s show: Paintings of snow-capped hills, the snow twinged with blue hue, set against colorful skies streaked with yellows, pinks, oranges and purples.
Her new work was conceived while riding horses with her daughter Olivia in the Bellevue Triangle. It was the first break she’d taken from painting in 28 years, and she found herself enchanted by the snow that piled continued to pile up all winter long.
“The light that accompanied that experience was mesmerizing,” she said. “It was magical iridescent, bold. It’s an exciting time for me because I’m returning with a fresh eye and new perspective. I’m becoming a little more minimal with a softer palette.”
While her originals are mainstays, Brown has offered some reproductions through markets like Target, Walmart, World Market and Bed Bath and Beyond. She will also offer 8-by-8-inch works this weekend for the first time for those who don’t have room for a 3-by-5-foot painting.
Everyone’s so stressed out that to get to transport them to a different place, to think I could do that for someone became empowering,” Brown said.