When she was 3 years old, Melissa Pierson saw her first giant redwood trees in California.
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And though she could have focused on the tree’s size, she instead noticed something else.
“It was all soft and red and covered with moss and ferns. And I was completely smitten,” said Pierson.
Since then, nature and color have always been important to Pierson, who recently opened her first art gallery, Melissa Blue Fine Art, at 148 Center St. in downtown Grayslake.
Though she studied art when she was growing up in Ingleside many years ago, Pierson didn’t get back to serious painting until about 15 years ago, after she had earned a degree in biology and raised a daughter.
Her forays into nature — monitoring butterflies in Peoria and then at Illinois Beach State Park in Zion — brought her back to dabbing hues of wildlife onto canvas.
Her subject matter is all about what’s in your yard, next door or at a local nature preserve. Some 30 acrylic paintings in her cozy gallery and studio include her Grayslake garden devoid of lawn and brimming with wild geranium leaves and a yellow poppy; a green heron she saw crouched near the water along the Des Plaines River in Lake County; and a single great white trillium she and her daughter Katie saw at Wright Woods in Vernon Hills.
On her easel rests a partially finished work showing American crows she discovered at the Rollins Savanna in Grayslake.
“I was walking along a trail and these crows lifted up beside me. The colors were beautiful. I was happy to see the crows,” because their population has declined due to West Nile Virus, she said.
A smaller size of the painting was featured at a gallery in Kenosha two years ago. A man purchased it and then called and asked her to paint a larger one.
“He loves the colors. He likes the purple and the blue,” which is contrasted by a golden glow of the afternoon light, she said.
Pierson said she started thinking about painting again when she became a volunteer butterfly monitor for The Nature Conservancy.
“We were working on restoring a prairie, and a butterfly the size of a platter flew past me,” she said. “It was a great spangled fritillary. I started learning my butterflies and monitoring them.”
Twenty years ago, she moved back to the Chicago area, where she became a butterfly monitor at Illinois Beach State Park.
“It’s just glorious — seeing all the fritillaries, eyed-browns, pearly eyes, hairstreaks. I started painting on location,” she said, adding that she then began to think of how people go to Costa Rica and Alaska to see nature, but forget what they have here.
“Everywhere else is more glamorous than where people live,” she said. “I want them to fall in love with what nature they have.”
Pierson met botanists and naturalists while volunteering at the state park, and one of them, Linda Curtis, has become a fan of her art.
Curtis, a Lake Villa resident and author of four books on sedges, has commissioned several works from Pierson. Curtis works with magnifying lenses examining the exact detail of sedges to identify them.
Pierson’s art is more impressionistic, less detailed, and that might be why Curtis is drawn to the work. When at Pierson’s gallery opening several months ago, Curtis said she especially liked a painting of two snapping turtles.
“They are in a pond wrapped in an embrace of courtship. They revolve around and around floating just below the water surface,” Curtis said. “It was a time capsule of an extraordinary event rarely seen by humans. There’s something about a painting that transcends a photograph.”
Another favorite is a Blanding’s turtle in a sedge meadow on a full moonlit night. “In the sky, a turquoise and orange moth with black wings flutter across the moon’s face,” Curtis said. That painting graces the cover of a Wisconsin Entomological Society publication.
Pierson’s work also can be seen at the Warren Newport Public Library in Gurnee, which purchased several of her paintings to display.
Joyce Proper, who lives in Lake Villa Township, collects paintings and drawings of hepatica, a native wildflower she’s loved since she was a child. She commissioned Pierson to do three hepatica paintings, which hang on her wall.
“I just love her use of color. She paints the things I love,” Proper said. Pierson recently created a piece for Proper, a musician and former church organist, that included a layer of music by Johann Sebastian Bach beneath a layer of hepatica.
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Proper is a volunteer steward at the Grant Woods Forest Preserve near Lake Villa. She and Pierson often take walks at the preserves together.
Pierson, a self-described environmentalist, said she is switching from using acrylics for painting to an earth-friendly product made of harvested, naturally colored minerals and black walnut oil.
“Acrylic is a petroleum product, and that’s been bothering me,” she said. “With the new oils, it will take longer for the paintings to dry, and I’ll have to do more planning.”
Pierson hopes to work on a series of butterfly paintings, showing the common winged beauties that can be seen in northern Illinois. Each project will be related to what she sees outdoors — but a special joy will come when she begins to do her art.
Said Pierson: “There’s something about painting on canvas that is satisfying to the soul.”
Sheryl DeVore is a freelancer for the News-Sun