BY KAREN BOSSICK

Melissa Graves Brown stands over a blank canvas with a brush covered in paint and begins flicking her wrist.

She drips and she dribbles, letting paint flecks fall like leaves in what she calls “controlled splattering.” She squirts water through her brush to create foliage on a tree. She blots the watery paint with a paper towel. And then she 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 in bedazzling eye-popping color in a style that is unmistakably Melissa Graves Brown’s.

“I was sitting in Colorado Gulch on one of those fall days when the sky was big and blue and a breeze lifted the leaves off the trees into the air, ending them swirling above. That movement pivoted my style--splatter sort of morphed into my style,” she said.

Those who have followed Melissa Graves Brown throughout the years will note that she is  beginning to feature more moons and more bodies of water in her acrylic on canvas work. She’s also incorporating more abstract expression in some of her paintings.

You can see it all during Friday’s Gallery Walk as Hemmings Gallery presents a new exhibition titled “ROOTED IN COLOR: Idaho Landscapes by Melissa Graves Brown.” Graves Brown will be present at the opening reception from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 6, at the gallery, which is located at 340 Walnut Ave. in Ketchum.

“I’m painting again with an enthusiasm I haven’t felt in a long time, and this show is an amazing launching pad,” said the Hailey artist. “Rooted in Color combines all my styles. And this opening feels kind of special because it’s my community, rather than being at a gallery showing where I don’t know people.

“And I want to bring light to the Hemmings Gallery and how amazing Glin and Edward are to be participating in this community as young gallery owners.”

Graves Brown always painted, even as a child growing up in Florida.

“When I started painting, I painted circles. I’m not a super idealistic person, but I can geek out on the mathematics of a circle being a mathematically perfect shape. And circles are in everything—they’re in our pupils, they’re in the eggs from which we were born—they ground my work.”

After getting a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Graves Brown began painting beach scenes replete with palm trees as she began noticing how passionate people were about trees.

She moved West—first to live in her parents’ vacation cabin in the La Sal Mountains near Moab, Utah, then to Sun Valley after a friend told her it was a ski town with a world-class ski mountain and a thriving market for artists.

I feel like I live in a Sun Valley bubble—there are so many artists here of all kinds from performing arts to visual arts. And that culture enables artists like me to survive,” she said.

Here, Graves Brown has traded the palm trees of her youth for the aspen that color the mountain slopes alongside the dark, brooding Douglas fir and lodgepole pine.

When beginning a painting, 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.

“Watching the wind lift the leaves from the trees and swirl around me was a pivotal moment,” she said. “I thought it would be so wonderful if I could capture that sense of motion.”

With her daughter and son graduating from college with degrees in biochemistry and art, she has more time to paint. And she can’t wait to get started in the new studio she just moved into near Friedman Memorial Airport.

“To have established myself, then raise kids here and return in a different phase of life means the world to me. I am so grateful,” she said.

It’s rare to attend a fundraiser—from NAMI-WRV to the Hunger Coalition—that does not boast a Melissa Graves Brown artwork being auctioned off. Her paintings line the walls of such institutions as St. Luke’s Wood River infusion center and the Hailey Public Library where she painted a Tree of Life.

And they hang in care centers from North Carolina to Washington, from New York to California.

Graves Brown has also participated in art projects with schoolchildren involved with Far and Wise and other organizations.

“If I can give a big canvas to the Hunger Coalition to try to sell for $10,000, why would I not?” she said. “I just like to bring color and light to people. I want to transport people into a more positive place. And I want my work to be as interesting up close as far away.”