Philadelphia, PA

Melissa Conroy

http://www.melissaconroy.com/

Artist Melissa Conroy currently lives in Northwest Philadelphia where there is ample opportunity to draw trees.  Trees and forests offer a multilayered narrative to draw from as an artist.  Their branches grow and spawn offspring that twist and tangle, growing upward in pursuit of light.  While the branches grow and entwine with neighboring trees, the roots do the same unseen, underground.  Trees offer shelter to us as well as to countless other animals and bugs.  At the same time, the spaces within and between trees contain a mystery that is both intriguing and a bit fearful.  Conroy describes her relationship to nature as passionate, complex and unsettled.  As an artist, she is concerned with the relationship forests contain between the sky and the ground, the roots and the branches, the bugs and the birds.  Her drawings are a meditation on the cyclical nature of forests as well as the mystery and magic they contain.  The work that the Pennsylvania Convention Center acquired from her is from a series of large scale print patterns entitled “Forever Forest”.  The process for creating these images involved weeks of drawing on paper with pencil, followed by digital reconstruction to enhance the color, texture and repeatability of the images.  These prints are Conroy’s enchanted forest.