Architectural Forms and Figures: Art by Melissa Kenyon McIntyre
Mondragon Road, acrylic and watercolor
Melissa Kenyon McIntyre works in a range of media, painting architectural forms and figures relating to religious ceremony and space. Based in New Mexico, the artist often takes the local landscape and climate as inspiration, with many of her works utilizing warm tones and heavy-contrast shadows.
I love Melissa’s depictions of missions and other buildings – these stone constructions, monolithic in design, are often quiet stark. Melissa’s paintings call attention to the way certain moments like trees and support pillars cast nearly black shadows across the surface of a wall, creating visual interest and detail where they may not have been any.
Melissa's Mission Series on her website
The artist's acetate angels seem to fall into the overall subject matter of the majority of her works, though these are a bit of a departure stylistically. At first glance Melissa's angels appear quite different from her paintings, with spindly, narrow outlines and flat planes of color. On closer inspection one can find numerous similarities, in the artist's colored shading and slightly gestural formal details.
