Melissa Brown¹s images explore the genre of landscape painting in a contemporary context with a post-industrial flavor. Her paintings take on some traditional landscape themes of the powerful and majestic in order to deliver an emotionally charged visual experience that is not rooted in sentimental romanticism. Elements of industrialized civilization populatethe grand scenes. The paintings are made with rollers and stencils to yield a uniform but still hand-made surface.

"Pollination Station" depicts a lavish garden of flowers with five colorful smoke clouds billowing out from the background. Streams of bees flow outfrom behind the clouds and gather around the towers of Foxglove in the foreground. The scene invites you into the pleasurable garden, however there is an undeniable sinister presence. The painting makes a visual parallel between blooming flora and the puffy clouds, pointing out that beauty can be both alluring and deadly.

"2 Die 4" is a depiction of a mountainous landscape through a car windshield. As children, many of us have experienced the beauty of a passing landscape while strapped in to the backseat. Although this viewpoint is one step removed from what Casper David Fredrich may have experience when he stood in front of a gorge feeling humbled by the power of nature, it is never the less profound and closer to a more universal experience of sublime landscape.

"Arctic Explosion" and "Pastoral Explosion" showcase the mechanical stencil technique that characterizes her style of painting. Elements of the same drawing are repeated in both images. While one painting depicts a snowy plateau, and the other a series of rolling hills, they appear to portrait the same event from opposite vantagepoints.

The paintings are fantastic and brightly colored and attempt to perpetuate the age old myth that a sensitive soul may have a profound and mystical interaction with the natural world even if it is through the plastic filter of contemporary society.

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