About the artist
Hello, and welcome. I’m so glad you’re here. My name is Melissa and I’m a painter living and working in Somerset West in the Western Cape, South Africa.
My oil paintings are my way of exploring nature up close. I love to paint large scale florals with interesting compositions, the kind that let me, and the viewer, notice details we’d otherwise walk straight past in a garden or a bouquet. I want people to see the colours, textures, and small imperfections that make up a single flower, the things you only catch if you really stop and look. More than anything, I want my work to be explorable, paintings that keep revealing something new long after the first time you’ve seen them.
My primary medium is oil paint. I love the rich colours it allows and I like to build up my paint in layers, working with glazes to create translucency and depth. Most of my work can be described as romantic realism, working from mostly my own photographs to paint what I see as accurately as possible, while playing with rich backgrounds, lighting and composition to give each piece a romanticised, beautiful feel.
Today, I am so happy that my work has found a home with collectors locally and internationally. From Pretoria, Johannesburg, Mossel Bay, Wellington, Perth and Dallas. One of my proudest moments was completing a large scale protea commission that now hangs in a beautiful home in Johannesburg. I’m also deeply grateful to the collectors who have returned to add more than one piece to their own collections over the years.
Currently I’m exploring some wildlife paintings, in particular detailed bird studies that were inspired by a trip to the Kruger National Park in 2025. Alongside this, I’m working on new commissions and more floral paintings that I’m looking forward to sharing soon.
Whether you are a collector, designer, or simply someone who loves flowers, welcome. I hope you enjoy exploring my work in the shop or finding out more about commissioning a painting.
Painting is not new to me. I started extramural art classes at the age of seven and took art as a subject all the way through to matric. I then went on to complete a National Diploma and eventually a Btech degree in Performing Arts Technology, specializing in Props and Decor (scenic painting), and won the Decor prize three years in a row. Decor as a subject was a wonderful introduction to historic painting techniques, studying the work of the masters by copying it at large scale. Alongside this, I had formal classes in textile design and drawing, and as part of my props specialisation I learned a wide range of painting techniques along with accurate anatomy through extensive figure drawing and sculpting.
For the past twenty years I have been working as a freelancer in the film and television industry specializing in props mould making on productions including Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes, Mad Max: Fury Road, Black Sails, Outlander, Bloodshot and One Piece. Attention to detail has always been something I take real pride in, and it’s a quality that has stayed with me ever since. You can see more of my credits on my IMDb page.
