melissajhartley

"From as long as I can remember I've always had a love and an urge to create. As a child I was always drawing and making things. At school I would create scenes in the margins of my school books depicting candy and all things girly, much to the amusements of my teachers!"

I'm a self taught artist, that studied graphic design and who has been working for the last 15 years in Publishing in Sydney and Edinburgh. In 2010 I decided to pick up the paint brush again and pursue my love of painting.

My compositions vary from simple, often nostalgic still-life studies with plain backgrounds, to darkly poetic female portraits against undefined backgrounds, in a void or dream-like state.

These mystical portraits of women, almost haunting in their beauty, are seeped in the natural world, each work contains an element of the supernaturally surreal. They are contradictions within themselves, brought to sensual life through surrealistic icons & symbols. Each subject is attractive yet somehow disturbing.

These paradoxes play an important part in my work, the subtly strange, with an intermingling of the pretty and obscure, distant and elusive, but at the same time sensual and enticing. These females seem like they could be from another world.

I'm inspired by many things, but my paintings predominately draw on the sublime beauty of nature, old traditional craftsmanship, especially botanical illustrations of the past, and fashion photography. I also like to incorporate tattoo designs on my females, melding this old world with the new.

I desire to create images of beauty and mystery that allow the viewer to find their own personal significance in them, traversing emotions that reside deep within our own subconscious.