Melissa Mulder currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario and works full time from her home studio. Formal education includes Graduation from Sheridan College (Art), Humber College (Floral Design) and Netherlands Floral Botanical Experience Certification (Schooling and Apprenticeship). Mel’s first vocation was one surrounded by flowers. The scent, life span, colour, variety, fragility and painterly qualities of flowers were something she studied intimately by way of formal education and by more than 25 years of working with flowers. One would say that she painted with petals, which has now evolved to her current vocation and art form as a Relief/Fresco-Secco-esque Artist, a new extension of the flowering world.

“Life itself is a good and precious gift" a statement made more poignant by the early passing of my father and the years of working intimately with the fragility of flowers. Flowers are always dancing between the boundaries of optimal beauty and impending decay. After my Dad died, I began to thirst after the undiscovered secrets of immortalization. How can I stop the cycle and get off this ride? Of course, I personally cannot but here, in this art form, my imagination can, woven in amongst the flowers, if only for a little while.  The allure of capturing and holding indefinitely all of those delicately delicious fleeting flowers. Breathing back to life the wildness of uncultivated beauty in imperfect forest fern or toppled secret gardens, forever preserved by turgid sturdy impression of gypsum. The rigidness softened by paint. Flowing transparent colour over, around and between the convex impressions, with highlights of chalky opaque veins, embellishments of carving, scratching and sanding helping to depict what a flower might feel and experience in its environment rather than what they merely look like. I explore the colourful essence that goes unseen by the naked eye, the vibration of the Flora. I just get lost in it, and it brings me back to life.”