More than a decade ago, Melissa Moss was living in Los Angeles and not loving it. She was an executive in the production end of the publishing business, responsible for magazine editorial pages. As much as she disliked the work, it would prove to be useful training for an unexpected career shift into the arts, and a growing body of brightly rendered, often whimsical acrylic paintings and drawings in which animals and anthropomorphic creatures inhabit a botanically inspired world of greenery.
“I was beyond miserable there,” Moss says of her years of toil in LA — a sharp contrast to the home and studio in Asheville she now shares with her husband Ian, a teacher at Carolina Day School, and their seven-year-old son Sam. “There is really nothing I miss from big-city life except maybe IKEA and art-supply stores. I’m still amazed when people here complain about the traffic. They have no idea.”
But it was when she left her publishing career in Los Angeles that Moss began her training as a working artist, by way of a few continuing-education courses at UCLA that expanded her eye for color and pattern and uncovered an unrealized passion for drawing. “I wasn’t surprised it was my passion,” Moss recalls, “but I was surprised that I could actually do it. I was constantly doodling and drawing as a kid, but it wasn’t until taking those courses that I found I have a steady hand and a love of color.”
She was introduced to working with acrylics in the first course she took, although it was taught as a purely decorative technique and she soon moved on to more formal training in drawing and composition, where one of her first assignments was to experiment with drawing an otherwise common subject.
“I chose to draw a mushroom,” she remembers, “and the assignment was to paint it any way you wanted. So I ended up turning it into a jellyfish, and that began my fascination with sea creatures and anything related to the ocean.”
Although at first glance Moss’s work, especially her earlier efforts, seems lighthearted in nature, a second and closer look shows a darker side, one that’s come more to the forefront in recent years. Creatures are threatened by other creatures; vines writhe menacingly; danger seems to loom. “My very early work was mostly trees and jellyfish, and I would try and paint them in a way that gave them life or some sort of emotion,” Moss says. “Then I started painting little square creatures, a good way to give the paintings more emotion, and I would often have the creatures about to get eaten or in some serious danger. That satisfied my darker side.”
Lately, Moss’s creatures have metamorphosed into rounder, more appealing figures, at once brave and adventurous but, with their spindly legs and wary expressions, fragile and vulnerable. They’re reminiscent of an earlier generation’s children’s stories — deceptively innocent at first reading but carrying a stern and minatory undercurrent, a warning that not all in nature is bright and beautiful.
Although the works seem to have flowed onto the canvas in a stream of line and color, the composition of each is meticulously structured. “I sketch out every idea before I paint,” Moss says. “I wish I could paint the other way, and I have tried a couple of times with good results, but most of the time those free-style paintings end up being overworked, because they never look finished to me. But even if they don’t work out the way I thought, I like learning new techniques.”
Moss’s career has advanced to the stage where she’s now widely represented by galleries around the country. Her work has a strong online following on Etsy and is present in a number of retail outlets in downtown Asheville, including ZaPow! and Kress Emporium.
She’s had shows as far away as Hong Kong, and her collectors include such major players as Susan Sarandon and Amanda Seyfried. More recently, one of Moss’s paintings made the A List when it was shown in two scenes from the movie The Fault In Our Stars, starring Shailene Woodley.
It’s quite a rewarding change from the dreary 9-to-5 she left behind so many years ago. “Being an artist fulfills a long-term dream to do something creative with my life,” Moss says. “It’s nice to use the other side of my brain.”
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