CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Melissa Boughey

**News Update**

Melissa Boughey Finalist in Omnia Art Prize 2026.

Melissa Boughey’s painting practice speaks of a life lived on the land and an intimate connection with both the wild and tamed landscapes formed through her close daily interactions working on her farm and her commitment to revegetating native habitat. Ocean swims, walking the dog, and drawing en plein-air in the rich paperbark wetlands a stone's throw from her studio make up some of her deeply resonant experiences of landscape. Melissa’s loose plein air drawings allow the viewer a glimpse into the artists working process and provide a visual clue to some of the shapes and forms that emerge in her resulting paintings.

Beginning with the artist’s immersion within the landscape - jotting notes; scribbling responses; creating a shorthand code for the natural environment - experimentation and play are paramount to the intuitive process of her paintings. Through mark-making, colour play, and a sense of integrity toward materials and surfaces, her visceral works in oil and hand-made beeswax mediums are allowed to develop of their own accord until a final, resolved memory of a landscape emerges.

In his essay Cross-Pollination (2023), Andrew Stephens highlights Melissa Boughey’s distinctive, sensory approach to painting, describing her as an artist who works in a state of “reverie”, a meditative flow where perception, memory, and emotion intertwine. Boughey’s practice combines plein air experimentation with studio refinement, as she immerses herself in the physical and emotional atmosphere of each place. She often paints on dampened paper, dipped into natural waters, responding intuitively to texture, light, and movement. This process allows different landscapes from “the gorges of Tjoritja to the misty highlands of Tasmania” to merge and cross-pollinate on the page. Boughey herself reflects, “I am more interested in creating a feeling of place,” and her richly layered works invite viewers not to look at the landscape but to feel within it, capturing the quiet pulse of being present in nature.

The artist’s translations of her surroundings, her sense of perception, thought and emotional responses, all coalesce in her large, fluid images; first sketched in shorthand on paper and then built up into larger impasto canvases. Loose gestural explosions of colour and line tell us abstractly of the environment that surrounds her. Great daubs of purple brown speak of undulating earth; pools of orange indicate the rising up of a hill or valley; rapid gestures capture the quality of scrubby bush and vertical repetitions suggest an outcrop of trees. Within these expressive images the physical process of observation, appreciation and individual interpretation coalesce in a newly reflected world where mind and matter are fused into one.
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Phe Luxford, 2021

ARTIST PROFILE:
Melissa Boughey completed a Bachelor of Arts (ART) Curtin University WA (1994) and then moved south (near Kwoorabup/Denmark WA) where she has lived and worked for 30 years, and raised a family, a small-farm business, and a dedicated studio practice.

Melissa currently works from her converted farm-shed studio, overlooking pristine rehabilitated wetlands, and takes inspiration from her close daily interactions of living and working a seasonal life. Observation, through her plein air adventures, is at the heart of her emotive drawing and gestural abstract oil painting practice, but she is enthral to the materiality of paint, surface tension and creating opportunities to surprise herself and move into the realms of the unknown, finding joy and wonder there.

Melissa exhibits regularly in Sydney, Melbourne and regional WA and has been selected as a finalist in a number of national shows including the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2021, 2019), The Paul Guest Prize for Drawing (2016), Kogarah Art Prize (2015), Albany Art Prize (2015), Lloyd Rees Landscape Prize (2015) & Fleurieu Art Prize (2011) amongst others.. She was recently awarded the 2025 Omnia Art Prize (VIC) by esteemed judge Sophie Travers. Her work is held in the Busselton Health Service, Mental Health Unit, WA, The Office of the Public Sector, Government of Western Australia and private collections in Australia, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and France.

DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)