Perspective isn't assigned. It's chosen.
Studio sessions underway. Full image gallery live Spring 2026. Click any painting to learn more. UV pieces can be toggled between daylight and black light.
"The painting does not change. Your relationship to it does."
What came prior to this moment made it possible.
Melissa Prior was born in Minnesota and has spent more than half her life rooted in the Pacific Northwest. Art found her early and stayed close, following her into college where she minored in it and threw herself in fully. A six-foot painted pepper still hangs from the ceiling of her studio today, a quiet reminder that art can be painful, powerful, and worth carrying with you.
For years, Melissa was the resident artist at a local wine bar, her colorful, textured abstracts filling the walls, her presence woven into the community. Then, without warning, the bar closed. Several of her paintings disappeared in the process. She was young, raising young children, and facing a loss that felt too fragile to chase. So she made the only choice that felt survivable. She stepped away.
What looks like giving up rarely is.
When she returned to the canvas, something had shifted. She sat with an ugly, unforgiving canvas long enough to start seeing what was already there: flowers emerging from the texture, shapes rising from stillness, meaning surfacing from what looked like nothing. That painting became the beginning of everything she is making now.
Her style is chaos and texture and bold color. She builds surfaces in layers, filling canvases with shapes and energy that feel both wild and intentional. She wants people to feel happy. She wants them to feel inspired. She wants them to stand in front of something and see themselves in it.
Melissa Prior is not a cautious artist. She is a returning one, and there is a difference. She knows now what she almost let go of, and she is not letting go again.
Every flower in the By Hand collection begins the same way — a ball of foam clay, rolled in the palm of a hand. The texture pressed into every petal isn't decorative. It's literally the lifeline, the lines of Melissa's palm, built into the clay itself before a single petal is shaped. No two are identical. No two ever will be.
The Garden Box is assembled by hand, each flower selected and combination considered. It arrives ready to gift for anniversaries, birthdays, Mother's Day, any time someone deserves something special.
Commission inquiries, gallery and wholesale questions, and original work are all welcome. A limited number of commissions are accepted each year.