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Melissa Klein BIO
I was born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1968 to a botanist father and artist mother. I grew up in a large family with one brother and two sisters and a never-ending succession of pets. My family moved to St Louis, and then Philadelphia where the majority of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood occurred. I earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts from University of Pennsylvania in 1990. After graduation I worked a variety of jobs including business manager for a bronze art foundry and art teacher at a halfway house for schizophrenics.
While visiting my parents who had moved to Florida, I was caught by hurricane Andrew. Accompanying my father in the reconstruction of the Fairchild Botanical Garden, I produced paintings and drawings, documenting the clean-up, which remain in their collection.
I found work as Mold Master at a foundry where I met the man who would eventually become my husband. Not long after we met, but long before we married, I moved to Kaua’i, Hawai’i where I lived from 1999 to 2003 and earned a Masters of Education through a cohort program with Gonzaga University and the state of Hawai’i. While on Kaua’i, I was an active member of the Kaua’i Society of Artists and Garden Island Arts council. Inspired by the tropical setting, I produced many landscapes; some of these works are in the collection of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The Kaua’i Children’s Discovery Museum commissioned a mural, which chronicled both native and invasive species on the island. I also started a series of “Circus Posters” which poke fun at society. This series continues to the present day.
I moved to Sequim, Washington in 2003 where I bought a house, got married and fulfilled a lifelong dream by adopting a pregnant draft horse mare as a rescue from the drug industry. Horse ownership has served as inspiration for an entirely new direction in my work; a more spiritual direction. I am a proud graduate of the Artist Trust’s Edge program (2006), which has given me invaluable skills for developing my art career. I teach Commercial Art, among many other subjects, at Lincoln High School in Port Angeles.
Throughout my life as an artist I have always sought to broaden my horizons and explore new subjects as well as techniques.
Selected Highlights
Melissa Klein has been exhibiting her work since 1990. She has shown in Philadelphia, Kauai and the Olympic Peninsula/Washington. Her work is in the collections of the Kauai Children's Discovery Museum (a mural), Fairchild Tropical Garden in Florida and the National Tropical Botanical Garden of Hawaii and was in an exhibit at the Sequim Arts Museum (2011). She has been published in the books “The Artist and The American Landscape” by John Driscoll (1998) and “Maskmaking” (1986) by Carol Sivan. She has also had her artwork featured in Zento Magazine and Kauai Magazine and won the top award for adult art for TidePools Magazine in 2007. She has created illustrations for Fairchild Tropical Garden, CoreStates, University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Foster Manufacturing (North American Publishing), Intercollegiate Newspaper and Dot Dot Dot Art Magazine. She received a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 and a Masters of Initial Teaching from Gonzaga University in 2003.