Melissa McGill is a contemporary abstract artist exploring landscape, natural systems, and our relationship to the natural world.

Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, Melissa McGill creates abstract paintings and monotypes on canvas and paper. Working across acrylic painting, watercolor monotype, and encaustic monotype, her practice is rooted in a love of process, material experimentation, and the unexpected possibilities that emerge through making.

For McGill, abstraction is a form of communication—a visual language through which color, form, texture, and material can convey experiences and ideas that resist literal representation. Her work develops through an ongoing exchange between intention and discovery, allowing the behavior of the materials to become an active part of each composition.

Landscape and the processes that continually reshape it are recurring influences. The sedimentary formations of the Great Basin, desert arroyos, and the rivers and creeks of the Pacific Northwest inform a visual vocabulary of layers, boundaries, passages, accumulation, erosion, and change. Pouring, staining, scraping, printing, transferring, and mark-making echo these natural processes as forms emerge, overlap, dissolve, and reorganize across the surface.

Driven by curiosity and a deep engagement with color, McGill approaches each body of work as an exploration. Rather than depicting specific landscapes, her paintings and monotypes consider the relationships, forces, and conditions through which environments, and our experiences of them, continually take form.