About

Short Bio

Melissa Gray is an artist in New Hampshire, who works with watercolors and acrylics in an impressionistic style.

Statement

"It is both a burden and a blessing to constantly see the minute details of nature, with its symmetry, color, and form. I paint because I must interpret the images invariably flashing through my mind."

Biography

Melissa Gray is an artist in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire. Art has been a part of her life since childhood, when she took lessons at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts and continued her art education in secondary school. Since then, she has learned from various artists including Evelyn Dunphy of West Bath, Maine. After raising two children and working full time for doctors, hospitals, and later on in educational advancement until 2019, Melissa now has time to pursue her passion for painting.

Melissa has been drawn to painting with watercolors and acrylics on small and large canvases and discovered her greatest joy is mixing beautiful pigments to create new representations of the natural world, often intensifying the vividness of nature's colors. She seeks to paint with the feelings elicited by the subject rather than perfectly reproduce what humanly can’t be replicated. Lately, Melissa has been drawn to abstract art. A few of her favorite artists are Neil Welliver, the Wyeths, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Wolf Kahn. She has been creative in many areas, including writing, photography, desktop publishing, and web design for work, and yarn creations, plants, and music for her own enjoyment.

Melissa’s art has been displayed at various small venues, and her prints and paintings have been sold in two Maine framing galleries. She has done several private commissions. Melissa Gray is a juried member of The Art Center in Dover, NH and a member of Kittery Art Association and Women’s Caucus for Art/NH. She graduated from Colby-Sawyer College in 1976.