Melissa Smith began painting landscapes in an extended horizontal format in the late 1980’s while pursuing an MFA in Painting at Tulane. After having grown up in central hilly North Carolina, she was taken with the lush flat expanses of south Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf coast.

She works plein-air (with her dog) from the back of her SUV or from an old pontoon boat. Her work has been exhibited regularly in New Orleans for the last twenty years, and is included in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.

To convey the fragile yet timeless qualities of the local landscape, Smith couples a heightened depiction of the light and weather of specific views with subtle distortions of perspective. More information and images can be found at melissasmithlandscapes.com.