Belle Époque

Details Artist Bio Shipping 8 x 8 inches (Diamond, 11 x11 inches) © 2014 Acrylic on Gesso Board Framed to 10 x 10 inches (Diamond, 14 x14 inches) Melissa Hartley is a self taught artist, that studied graphic design and who has been working for the last 16 years in Publishing in Sydney and Edinburgh. In 2010 she decided to pick up the paint brush again and pursue her love of painting. Her compositions feature 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 her work, the subtly strange, with an intermingling of the pretty and obscure, distant and elusive, but at t