Photo by Molly Tierney.
Melissa Huddleston’s paintings are steeped in historic print and papermaking processes and suffused with her ruminations on primordial origins and the sublime happenstance of life. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is not applied, but transferred, through water baths to achieve layered compositions of organic shapes, swooshes, and swirls of opalescent color floating with mysterious levity. Huddleston’s processes are informed by the cultural, social, and feminist histories of works on paper and its previous segmentation from fine arts materials, with associations to minor arts, craft, and ephemera. Paper marbling is commonly connected with ancient Asian and European scriptural arts as well as the Japanese art of suminagashi. Huddleston’s paintings intersect aspects of these traditions with the idiom of modernist abstract expressionist painting.
Melissa Huddleston (b.1981, Elm Springs, AR) lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds a BA from Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, where she studied painting under Ed Bereal. Solo exhibitions include The Drops (2026) and Primordial Spring (2024), Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, CA and The Beautician, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Select group exhibitions include Excavations, Río Hondo College Art Gallery, Río Hondo College, Whittier, CA (2017); Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California, Craft Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); and The Collectivists, Brand Library Art Center, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Huddleston has been an artist in residence at The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New Berlin, NY. Her work is held in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA and the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, NY. She has been featured in the publications Artforum, Hyperallergic, L.A. Weekly, and XTRA.
