We are so delighted to be working with Melissa Lakey, the amazing new artist behind the colour-drenched landscapes of our Desert Moon card range celebrating wild swimming, camping and crazy horses.
Melissa Lakey is an artist and illustrator based in Joshua Tree, California, where the windows of her art studio look out onto the Mojave Desert. She wanted to be a cowgirl when she grew up but became an artist instead, and now cowboys ride through her paintings, picking flowers and stopping to swim in every creek they pass. She loves to work in mixed media, combining organic textures, fun colors, and playful subject matter to create artwork that celebrates the magic of the American Southwest, as well as a love of travel, nature, road trips, and swimming.
See Melissa Lakey's Desert Moon card range here
Visit Melissa Lakey's Website here
In her own words:
I create work based on both real memories and imaginary places I’d like to visit — swimming, dreaming, in the sunshine and under the moonlight. I like to imagine my paintings are moments in stories I wish I knew, folktales half-remembered but that never existed at all.
I work in mixed media, combining watercolor, ink, gouache, oil pastel, and colored pencil. I paint quickly, usually without a plan, leaving room in each painting for surprises and experiments. This playful approach keeps art exciting for me.
I’ve always been drawn to night scenes, and have been exploring them in my artwork for a few years now. There’s something extra special about night here in the desert where I live. Sometimes I can hear a pack of coyotes yipping and playing in the hills outside my studio or the hoot of an owl in the distance. There’s space for dreams and for solitude. Music and musicians are another theme I keep returning to. What are the melodies of the stars, the moon, the wildflowers? What is the music of dreams?