Melissa Miller

I am a southern painter. I love this land, the people, the sunsets, and the sun-ups. I love the way the telephone lines carry drawn out words into the crimson skies, draping pole to pole down an endless single lane road. This place sings to my heart and soul. There is magic about it. The summers here are oppressive yet captivating. There are no big skies of the west or thick fronts of the northeast. Southern summer skies are intense and quick-tempered. Evenings produce a calm eeriness that beguiles the wet sweltering heat of the day only punctuated by a stray bat or effervescent lightning bugs illuminating a dark forest. Blue-gray haze and intense summer heat inspire my artwork along with a swarm of no-seeums over a field of hay. The deafening shrill of the cicadas on a breezeless summer morning awakens my senses and it is a love of place as well as an impact of a moment that I wish convey.

Abandonment fascinates me: farmhouses left to decay or are reclaimed by the land itself in the middle of a plowed field. Maybe this is a nod to my Scottish ancestors who traversed these hills and fields to settle in the Georgia piedmont. Why do they gracefully plow fields around them, sealing off any hint of a drive or entrance with tobacco or cotton creating sentinels of the south and testaments to lives lived long ago.

I form a connectedness to place with this evidence of the people who worked the land. This is the south that exists on that teary place behind your eyes and reaches down into your chest. I round the corner onto my street. Houses sleep in a blue twilight haze. Steam rises from the asphalt. Wisteria creeps along power lines, and I am home.

Currently living in Gaithersburg, MD, Melissa Miller has been a painter for her entire life. As a child, she would spend hours in the wooded area behind her house just observing the trees and water flowing in a nearby stream. She remembers feeling that trees were sacred and was in awe of the large old oaks on the property. She would study the leaves and their intricate pattern of veins as well as climb into the canopy of a tree downed by lightning which lived for years via a slip of a root connection still intact. That was a magical place for her, which left a lasting impression on her to this day.

She began working in earnest in 1995 after discovering the versatility offered by acrylic media while studying with well-known contemporary artist Jane Filer. Melissa developed an immediate affinity for landscapes, particularly subjects with a uniquely southern flavor such as abandoned farmhouses, rural stretches of roads or ever-present hay bales, which roll lazily down hillsides of Orange County, NC. She worked to create a style of paint application, composition and subject matter choice that was uniquely her own. Melissa frequently sought out critique from artists whose work she admired to punctuate years of just plain painting hundreds of paintings. A major influence for her is the California Colorists.

Melissa has exhibited throughout North Carolina as well as in Maryland and the District of Columbia.

Her work has been included in juried shows at:

• The Durham Art Guild, Durham, NC
• Cary Fine Arts League, Cary, NC
• Page-Walker Arts Center, Cary, NC
• Rosenzweig Museum, Durham, NC
• Carrboro Arts Center, Carrboro, NC
• Centerfest, Durham, NC
• Artsplosure, Raleigh, NC
• Arts at the Meadow, Chapel Hill, NC

Her work has been exhibited at several other gallery spaces including:

• Art Source, Raleigh, NC
• North Carolina Crafts Gallery, Carrboro, NC,
• Sky Art Gallery, Aberdeen, NC
• Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough, NC
• Eno Gallery, Hillsborough, NC
• Craven Allen Gallery, Durham, NC
• The Artists’ Gallery, Frederick, MD
• The Foundry Gallery, Washington, DC.