Melisssa started out her art practice doing portraits of horses. Finding this tediously boring and non-creative, she started exploring other styles of painting. This search led her to an abstract-expressionist mentor. One of the first exercises she did was using movement from their body to make marks on the surface with a large brush with arm extended straight out.

The mark Melissa made was just a simple, large black swipe across a 4 ft piece of paper taped to the wall. But the movement contained in that mark captivated her