Contemporary artist Melissa Herrington explores the complexities of transformation and the female form in her work. Inspired by adventure, independence, and her love of color and texture, Herrington’s paintings function as both an individual entity and as a part of a larger theme of her practice. Working on many pieces at once, Herrington constantly shifts each work around, creating a developing story, a set of possibilities.
Her new series, At the Cusp of Midnight and Color blur the lines between mediums, forms, and concept. These new paintings are like clouded midnight skies, beauty bruised in hues of blue, purple, and black.
Continuous marks seem to bleed into the watered canvas. Conjuring a feeling of floating in a vast sea of mystery, shades of the night convey a sense of boundlessness, suggesting an infinite expanse. There is no physical boundary – no wall, no border, no fence around the edges of this cosmos. Herrington’s silhouetted figures evolve in a cosmological horizon. These contoured shapes are often scaled to her own body or surrounding environments, tempting the viewer to engage or simply float alongside them.
At the heart of Herrington’s artistic practice is an unmistakable relationship between distilled color, form and process. As contoured shapes emerge from the abstract, the viewer is witness to form unfolding, creating new visual possibilities, using foreground and background, color and plane.
