The Darkest Star

This painting was part of a series that symbolises emotion and loss and the ritual that the gifting of flowers plays in our lives. It alludes to life and death, with a beautiful kind of sadness.

There is a sense of melancholy hidden behind their floral colour palette and characters. Faces are encased by flower arrangements, the petals mimicking the soft shades of the characters’ skin, or roses dripping with emotional tears.

The isolating effect of deep black seems to heighten the vulnerability and seeming desire to place trust in the viewer. Concerned with its depiction of space, seeking a particular sense of void that seems to arise only in the nighttime, the black depth adds to the dream-like quality. Things start to manifest in the dark, our loves, our fears. This chiaroscuro effect is used for the sake of drama and the emotional impact it implies. Hauntingly beautiful, they contemplate space, time and the fragility of the human condition.

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Melissa Hartley is a self taught artist, that studied graphic design and who has been working for the last 19 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.
She’s inspired by many things, but her paintings predominately draw on the sublime beauty of nature, old traditional craftsmanship, especially botanical illustrations of the past, and fashion photography.
Melissa desires to create images of beauty and mystery that allow the viewer to find their own personal significance in them, traversing emotions that reside deep within our own subconscious. Melissa was a finalist in the 2017 Mosman Art Prize and winner of the Award for painting in the North Sydney Art prize.