Landscapes, Real and Imagined

Silver Sky, Acrylic on illustration board, 4.5x6.5”

Artist Melinda Spear-Huff’s affinity for the Impressionist style, alongside her eye for complementing contemporary interiors, has led her to a variety of painting concepts throughout her 25+ years of experience in the field. 

Now showing in the City Gallery, Landscapes, Real and Imagined focuses on color harmony through minimalist landscapes that can easily be incorporated into what she calls “transitional interiors,” straddling the line between contemporary vigor and impressionistic openness. 

Circle Summer Night, Acrylic on canvas, 48x48”

The paintings vary in space and size, from a four-foot-tall depiction of Indianapolis’ Monument Circle to an enticingly dainty, sky-heavy landscape measuring just four inches wide. Throughout the ebbs and flows of different subject matter, the common thread of warm hues and soft brush strokes serves as a grounding undercurrent, a nod to the Impressionists and reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s nocturnes. In this, Spear-Huff seeks to honor the intimacy of spaces: she melts away barriers, inviting the viewer to meditate on location and encouraging an almost synesthetic experience; between the hazy color grading and minimal contrast, shapes melt together and the canvas becomes a window into captured memories and nostalgic moments. You can almost feel the humidity on your skin in Circle Summer Night and smell the dew-tipped grass in Night Fall. 

Spear-Huff recounts having a love for Impressionism for as long as she can remember. She is drawn to the suggestion of something without painful detail and the overlapping of colors as they blend and become indistinguishable from each other. 
Although she takes commissions full time in the studio alongside her beloved cat, Bob Scratchit, Melissa’s experience with on-site artwork, ranging from mural creations to live wedding paintings, adds another layer of intense presence that is captured in Landscapes, Real and Imagined. This captivating body of work is available for viewing in the City Gallery through September and the online gallery through October.

Night Fall, Acrylic on canvas, 24x24”