ABOUT THE ARTIST

I'm Melissa — some call me Missy Jo, my friends call me Mel.

I paint what I can't say. Art is my language.

For most of my life I felt very misunderstood—like I didn't belong. Didn't fit in. I thought there was something wrong with me — until I discovered I was highly sensitive. I was born in a world that requires you to have a hard shell. Think of a M&M without the candy coating — just the chocolate, exposed, no protection between me and everything I felt. I felt it all. Deeply and constantly, at full volume.

For years I felt invisible — not because I was hiding, but because being seen felt dangerous. I had no mask. I never did. I was just myself, everywhere, in every room — and somehow that threatened people and I was bullied for being different.

I created a bubble to survive. Inside the bubble was art.

I have been painting and drawing since I could hold a pencil. Inside the bubble was the real me — drawing and painting and expressing the feelings I couldn't say into every line and color I made. Unknown to me then, that bubble was art therapy. The only kind I had access to.

I was angry for a long time. I felt extremely misunderstood. I carried it into my twenties, my thirties, my forties. In my forties I read an article and finally understood — I had PTSD. I saw a therapist. Eventually I arrived at something unexpected:

I forgave them.

Not for them. For me. And also — because I believe everyone is in your life for a reason and plays a role — I should probably thank them. Ironically, I would not have become an artist without these experiences. They were cast in my story, playing exactly the role that led me to becoming an artist.

I came to color naturally, before I understood why. My high school art teachers told me I had a way with color — complementary combinations that I felt before I learned. Vibrant, saturated, and alive.

In college a professor once said — after a critique where our work hung on the wall — "If you want realism, take a photograph." That changed me forever.

I stopped chasing hyper-realism and finally accepted my own unique style, which I call impressionistic illustrations. Part impressionist, part illustrator, all raw feelings.

That same professor looked at an oil pastel I'd made — a figure I called Dungeon Man, painted in reds and purples, sitting alone at a table — and sensed I was troubled.

He read my entire emotional state just from my art.

My paintings have always been telling the truth. My truth. Even when I didn't know it.

Suddenly everything made sense. The intensity. The art. The feelings with nowhere to go.

I carried all of it — the invisibility, the anger, the PTSD, the dysmorphia, the imposter syndrome — for decades. Then when I turned 50, something shifted. Therapy. Forgiveness. Listening to voices that told me who I could be. And one day, quietly, without announcement —

I became the most confident version of myself I had ever been.

Months later I looked in the mirror and didn't see myself as hideous anymore.

I finally saw me — and I was pretty.

The distortion was never in the reflection. It was in how I'd been told to see myself for years.

Art has never been something I chose — it chose me — and I am madly in love with it!

But it took years of looking closely at my subjects to understand what I was really looking for.

I paint flowers the way I see people. I am drawn to composition, contrast, color and shape — but beneath all of that, I discovered I am looking for human relationships in flowers, or symbolically substituting them for the emotions and feelings that humans experience.

I am drawn to every stage of a flower's life. I paint them all. Because a flower's life cycle mimics our own. Every stage has dignity. Every stage has a story.

When I paint a landscape I am witnessing life in motion — seasons changing, trees shedding and rebirthing, nature creating and recreating itself endlessly. A tree has a personality and experiences just like us. The universe creates. Nature creates. And we create too. My art is my way of witnessing that, and saying — I was here. I saw it in its perfection and imperfection. It all matters.

This same search carries into my portraits. I have no interest in the posed, say-cheese moment. I want to capture the moment before, or after — the raw, unfiltered instant where something real about a person's essence is truly visible.

Whether I am painting a flower, a landscape, or a portrait, I am essentially doing the same thing: creating art that reveals that raw unguarded moment. The one that we usually hide away. That moment when the mask is really off. A lot of my work lately is about feeling seen. The stages we go through before we completely accept ourselves for who we are. I think that is what we all want, really. To be witnessed exactly as we are, at our most honest, before the mask goes back on — and maybe we get to a point in our life when we don't need the mask anymore.

Twenty five years ago I painted my very first serious flower in oil. A red tulip alone amongst the leaves that were behind her. Isolation. A feeling she was trying to overcome. I called her A Moment In Central Park.

I didn't fully understand then what I was really painting. I just painted the emotions viewing that flower gave me.

I understand now that they are all my repressed feelings. All of them. Giving them color, light, and a story — giving them a home.

Shortly after painting A Moment in Central Park, I started a pastel painting, meant to be an understudy — but before I knew it, it was a fully developed pastel painting. I realized the understudy had become the star. I called this one Lily and Her Shadow — a pink waterlily with a shadow underneath, the shadow she was trying to overcome. That was how I discovered pastels. By accident. And I never looked back.

I worked as a graphic designer for 30 years after getting my BFA and AAS from the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology. I consider myself multi-medium fluent — pastels, watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and oils and acrylics. My subject chooses the medium — not me.

Art always was my oxygen, my friend, and my companion.

And we made a pact to be together forever. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Info

Any questions? Contact me…
For commission requests please provide any necessary information.
Requests will be reviewed.

info@melissatobiaart.com