We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melissa Furness. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melissa below.

Melissa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

My creative life has been a series of calculated risks, big an small or in the middle. The bigger risks are the more personal ones, I would say. One that sticks out in my mind as life changing is when I decided to participate in an artist’s residency in Hungary–the first that I did abroad. I knew literally nothing about the place when I embarked on the experience, which I decided would be best to embrace. I was in graduate school at the time, heading into my final year of my MFA, hyper-poor and had no idea what the future had in store for me. I bought a plane ticket and footed the bills on a credit card that I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay off. And I went! I met a bunch of other creatives there and became this uprooted foreigner trying to find a way to “know” a people, a land, and to come to terms with public versus private experience. I was struck in a way, and the feeling transformed my work and my creative ideas, putting me on a path to where I am even today with my creative production. They way that I looked at other cultures and my place in the world was forever changed, and so the pit in my stomach with my personal struggle of how I am I going to pay for this and what is my future going to be was worth it and I found a way to somehow “figure it out”.

Melissa, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am primarily a painter, but also do sculpture, video and printmaking. I have been driven to be an artist since a very young age and trained in the visual arts as well as literature/writing through my undergraduate and graduate education. I am also an educator and currently teach at the University of Colorado Denver as a professor. CU Denver is a research institution, which values my creative research and allows me to utilize what I do as an artist as a way to provide students with skills and knowledge needed to be a professional artist working in the field today. What sets me apart in a way and which I am proud of are my creative projects in which I am able to push the boundaries of the traditional art object and to transform the public’s view of painting into a conceptual realm which does not reside only within the imagery of the two-dimensional picture plane. I am currently represented by K Contemporary Art in Denver, which is amazing for fostering and encouraging the type of work that I do, and that which is outside the norm of how the public experiences art.

What do you find most rewarding about being creative?

The best thing about what I do as the creative that I am, is that with my many jobs–as an artist, an educator, and a mother–each day is new and different from the next. With each of these positions, I am rewarded by those that appreciate and form a dialogue through my creative work, the immense pay back that I receive when I mentor students into the success of their own creative professional lives, and the strength and creative attitude that I observe in my daughter as she becomes her independent self.

I also find creative cultural insight to be rewarding, that I am allowed the freedom and ability to view the world in ways that delve into the multi-faceted nature of people and their surroundings. It is very rewarding to be able to give to the world as well as learn from it, to affect others and have them affect you, to observe, to notice things and put them out into the world in a new form that creates growth and change in perhaps small and leading into bigger ways.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I would say that a major creative trait is resilience. I can count a good number of times in my life which posed major personal challenges. These are often difficult to voice to others. One such event was not so long ago when I got a blood clot that nearly killed me at the age of 38, something that very few people know. I became quite depressed following this event and didn’t want anyone to know for fear that they would think me lessened or weakened, particularly since I was going up for tenure that very year. So I rather holed myself away and prepped a massive painting which I worked on from home and which didn’t even fit on the wall. It was 12 feet long and covered half of the open doorway going down the hall–the longest painting that I have produced up to this point, in fact. I poured myself into the work as I contemplated mortality and such in a not so grand sounding way. I struggled through the year and even in May I did not yet know the results of my job. I was the last to find out that I received tenure. I also finished the painting and it was included in a major solo exhibition flanked by moss panels that stretched 20 feet in length, as though consuming the painting, much like the prospect of losing my life did to me.

But as we all know, I made it through!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.melissafurness.com
• Instagram: @melissafurness
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melissa.furness/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-furness-43964286/
• Twitter: @MelissaFurness1
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MelissaFurness
• Others: Represented Gallery, K Contemporary Art : https://kcontemporaryart.com
  University of Colorado Denver, College of Arts & Media, Department of Visual Arts : https://artsandmedia.ucdenver.edu/areas-of-study/visual-arts/art-practices
  Artwork Available On-Line at : https://www.artsy.net/artist/melissa-furness/works-for-sale

Image Credits
#1 and #5 are credited to WM (Wes Magyar) Artist Services All others were photographed by me, no credit needed