October 2005

Brilliant Strokes

The Exquisite Paintings of Melissa Harris
by Sharon Nichols

It’s late September and the rain is coming down in sheets outside the window. The leaves have just started to turn into their fiery autumn colors, and some of them are sailing to the ground in the torrent. Melissa Harris is in her studio, but today she’s not painting. She’s looking through some recent pieces and talking to me about them. She tells me she’s been working on a local landscape of a meadow in a friend’s yard, a painting that was hard to tear herself away from during a recent trip to Minnesota.

“Although a lot of my paintings are landscapes, I don’t always do them on site,” she explains. “It’s really good for me, good for my soul, to go outside and paint. But it’s nice, too, when I leave and I’m in the middle of something. When I come back, I’m excited to get back to the painting.”

It’s not Harris’ landscapes, however, that have made her name known to the masses. I first became familiar with Harris’ work while living out west in the Rockies in the early '90s. I was drawn to the soft pastel strokes that I saw featured in a catalog of spiritual and metaphysical goodies called Pyramid Collection. There was Harris’ image of a woman under a full moon, her back arched and arms outstretched, the layers of her robe flying free as she danced—or maybe flew—with wild abandon. Something about the image clicked. It captured what I was feeling at the time. I even attempted to reproduce the image myself with pastels. Before I knew it, I was being drawn to her images elsewhere, mainly on greeting cards in metaphysical shops.

A decade after moving to New York, I bumped into Melissa Harris in Woodstock. Moments later I discovered that for the past several years I had unwittingly been living three doors down from her in Hurley, NY. I was being drawn to her still, and in ways I never imagined. It seems that synchronicity has played a starring role in both our lives and that synchronicity continues to unfold. I am now able to visit her spacious studio for myself, to view glorious nudes, whirling figures and luscious landscapes up close. I look forward each year to the open studio event she holds there. The next one is Saturday, October 15. Already, I cannot wait.

“It’s always a lot of fun, like a big party,” says Harris. “A lot of people who have begun to collect my work are always there, a lot of regulars. I have tables of originals that were maybe false starts, or ones that I never finished developing, so it’s a good opportunity to buy original paintings at great prices. I’ll also have items from my company, Creatrix, on sale, prints and other gift items. And some good snacks, wine and good music. And great people!”

A look through Harris’ many paintings at Creatrix—just follow the link at www.melissaharris.com—might have viewers suddenly revealing, “Oh, I know her work!” Her striking images have made appearances all over the country at this point, her paintings appearing not only on cards, but on prints, posters, mugs, magnets, journals, t-shirts, pendants, ornaments, votive holders and mouse pads. Creatrix, which has been carrying the more commercial, uplifting side of Harris’ work since 1990, features mystical or dreamlike images of women in different categories: magic, nature, dreams, love, meditation, cats and cycles of the moon. Her American, UK and Australian customers are drawn to the goddess and earth-based spirituality behind the work. But the less commercial portal on her Web site features the depth and intensity—and sometimes darkness—inherent in her fine art, the penetrating work you won’t see in stores: fantasy portraits, landscapes, butterflies and the sacred erotic.

Harris had no intention on becoming a commercial artist. Her training was in fine art, which differs from that of a commercial artist who might normally possess a background in illustration. Her emotive strokes, whether in oil or watercolor, have always been loose and expressive. She was constantly told as a child that she was “too sensitive,” and she’s had clairvoyant experiences all her life, which made her feel she was a little different. Her attraction to art was natural, and she was given a constant supply of paints, crayons and paper when she was young. Still passionate about art when she entered college, her parents discouraged it as a course of study, as they felt it wasn’t lucrative enough. So, she decided to major in fashion design.

“I couldn’t do the math,” she laughs. “And the pattern making. And every time I went by the third floor, the painting floor, I smelled it and I was homesick to be with my paint. By my third year of college, I decided to major in painting no matter what the consequences.”

The consequences were that she got into some trouble. She was put on probation by the all-male graduate committee for painting the wrong things. Harris was in the middle of a spiritual awakening, and she was producing the images that were coming through in visions and dreams.

“I was at Queens College in New York City,” she explains. “The paintings were kind of hokey looking, I have to admit. Kinda silly with glitter, just a little slick. But it was something I had to get out of myself. All my teachers were giving me a hard time about it. But one female teacher was very supportive. She knew astrology and we had great conversations. She knew I could paint and she understood that I was just experimenting. But she said, ‘Look, Melissa, you have to be able to graduate. I don’t care what you do on your own time, but you have to show these guys you can paint.’ I believe that anybody in the creative arts has to experiment, but these people wanted to see me in a compartment, some way they could fit me into their heads. Other people were doing still life or abstract expressionist paintings. I had been doing life size paintings, portraits of people, very expressive and intense. I knew at that point I really did want to graduate and not get kicked out of school. So, I did a series of these and they were saying, ‘Oh wow! Oh my god! This is your forte!’ I was just rolling my eyes, like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Just let me graduate.’”

Not only did Harris get her MFA, but only two painters at Queens were awarded a Fulbright grant to Paris that year, and the almost-booted Harris was one of them. She went from being on probation to sitting at a reception table at the American Embassy as part of a select group of Fulbright Scholars in all areas of expertise. She even exhibited her work there.

Harris’ art education also included Syracuse University, the University of Virginia, the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the New York Studio School. She’s shown her work at nearly two dozen solo exhibits and at many more group shows in the U.S. and France. Harris teaches private classes and workshops which combine art and meditation, some being held at Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, the Foundation des Etats-Unis and the Phoenicia Pathwork Center. She’s holding a painting workshop at her studio in October to help people discover what they’d like to express, but the class is already at capacity. As she hosts three workshops a year, her next one will likely be in the late winter or early spring.

Harris enjoys the teaching portion of her mission and all service-oriented aspects surrounding her art, as she helps others find their inner artist as well as their inner light. As someone who once did psychic readings for clients in the early '80s, she describes how she’s incorporated that part of herself into her artistry. One way is through the “spirit essence portraits” she was doing on her recent trip to Minnesota.

“Someone will come to me and I’ll tune into them, get impressions and images, then do a watercolor painting that weaves together the images I’m seeing into something that will be, hopefully, helpful for the person. It could be something they’re working on, or something they need to honor about themselves. It’s not painting that I do for myself. I don’t keep the paintings. I record them informally, but they’re not really part of my repertoire. They are 45 minute to an hour sessions to help people on their path of development.”

Harris also taught a painting workshop while on her trip, and she shares another experience in which she tapped into the needs of someone in her group. “One of the women was already an established artist, but she was having a hard time finding her subject matter. I was having a long discourse with her and I said, ‘Well, let’s say you wanted to paint…oh, I don’t know…’ and I stood there a second. Then I said ‘pumpkins,’ and she screamed. She’d actually been thinking of doing a series of pumpkins. She was totally freaked out. So, that was fun.”

Harris is prolific, usually working on at least three paintings at once. Oftentimes, it is her intuition that takes over when her logic is telling her to do something else in her art. For the past several years, she’s been drawn to painting images surrounding water and recently felt the need to honor a lake where she spends time in the summer both canoeing and swimming, a place she says “feeds her soul.”

“I thought it would be wonderful to do a Lady of the Lake painting,” she begins. “I took a friend who had dressed up, incredibly beautiful and transformed into this perfect Lady of the Lake. So, I took all these photos and was really happy with some of them. The thing that was calling to me at the time was the Lady of the Lake, not so much the lake itself. I started working on the painting and didn’t have the anatomy quite right in the figure, so I took the figure out. I was going to put her back in, but then I stepped back and realized that particular painting was just calling to be on its own without a figure.”

Since a trip to Morocco about four years ago, Harris has been painting intricate doorways. She draws many ideas from sacred places she’s visited throughout Mexico, Bali and England, in particular Cornwall. Also prominent in Harris’ work of recent years are butterflies, another topic that came to her in an unconventional way. “I had a dream some years ago that I was being shown specifically how to paint butterflies. And I’ve always loved butterflies. There’s nothing unusual about that, who doesn’t love butterflies? But I’d always been pretty obsessed with them and used to follow them around outdoors when I was a little kid. Make specific assignments for myself where I was going to go out and see a blue butterfly or whatever. In the dream I was using iridescent glazes. I’ve never actually done that, so I don’t consider that I’m finished painting the butterflies, but that’s what lead to the whole series.”

Harris’ art has appeared on CDs and audio cassettes, and in many publications over the years, most recently on the cover of a major magazine in the southeast called Skirt. Her work will also appear on Goddess magazine out of Duluth, MN, in next year’s WeMoon calendar and in a book called Feminine Mysticism in Art.

On this rainy day, Harris looks forward to a brighter one when she can return once again to the canvas, an afternoon when the light from the huge windows and skylight in her studio is warm and rich. She’ll enter a trance-like state by spinning Moroccan or African music, celtic, jazz or atmospheric tunes. She’ll gaze through the French doors overlooking the meadow and forest which comprise the nine acres of her paradise in the Catskill Mountains. And spirit will guide her brush.

Melissa Harris’ open studio will be held Saturday, October 15, from 11 am to 6 pm, at 104 Morgan Hill Road, Hurley, just five miles from the town of Woodstock. For information or directions, to purchase art online, or to inquire about commissioned portraits or landscapes, visit www.melissaharris.com.