MELISSA GRAY 

Throughout my school life I was awarded with many awards and prizes within the school for art, including my Honours and I was Head of Visual Arts in my final year, 2005. I also maintained a very high grade average through NCEA. In my final year, I gained a 100% grade average in visual arts, a visual arts scholarship in painting and my design portfolio was selected for the New Zealand exemplar book for excellence.

The theme of my painting portfolio was of an old and burnt building ruin in Christchurch. My focus was of the decay and textures that I have abstracted and layered to produce very deep earth tone colours. Interesting building elements, such as materials and textural relationships were further developed from this abstraction.

My design portfolio was on Children's Obesity in New Zealand with a positive focus for healthier eating.

In the beginning of 2005 I won the Sister Cities Art Competition that was held in Christchurch. My painting was sent to Washington DC to represent New Zealand in the International Sister Cities Art Competition. Although I was not a finalist my work was selected for the front page of the 2006 International Sister Cities Art Competition entry form, that was sent worldwide to help encourage young artists like myself. As a part of the competition I also had my own exhibition in the 'Basement Gallery' of the 'Creation Arts Space' in Christchurch, where I sold a lot of art and prints of my award winning painting.

I supported the Christchurch Art Competition again in 2006 and gained second place.

I was inspired to produce textural landscapes through a walk I did at Mount Sommers. Observing and being amongst many different textural, natural and material relationships developed my new abstraction. I work with rich earth tones and textures that relate to the land and its development, especially when considering layers and depth within natural existence. In a contrast to this people have commented on the textures as buildings, especially in the black and dark toned artworks to a relation of a night city.

Through developing a lot of landscape paintings I often wondered about how I could reconstruct and order the textural decay of land and buildings combined. I decided on a layering process that was defined by a linear and gradient reconstruction. All textural elements that are not linear connect with the uneven surface of the land that we build on or into. The layers of linear texture reflect my thoughts of a building's layering process before and after its life over time. Consequently, the white paint is used to show how I think a building is renewed through a coat of clean paint. Coating thickness hides more in some areas, but reveals more where it is applied in thinner layers. I believe that through this development, where more is revealed there is a greater depth and character.

I am currently working on a series of artworks that look at the exposure of the revealed textures in more detail. The minimal exposure within this concealment allows the textures more space around them to capture the existence outside of the painting.

My paintings are developing in colour and media from my university trip to Mexico in November, 2008.

I have recently completed my Bachelor of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, majoring in interior architecture. I gained a scholarship from Victoria University in 2006 for academic excellence from my schooling and I am currently on a Bonded Merit Scholarship through Study Link from my academic year in 2006 at University.