Melissa Schulenberg is an artist/printmaker who currently resides in Canton, New York where she is the L.M. and G.L. Flint Professor in Fine Arts at St. Lawrence University. Growing up in Michigan and South Dakota, she was always interested in drawing and painting but never knew about printmaking. It wasn’t until college, taking numerous printmaking courses and working at the Bowdoin Art Museum, that she discovered the wonderful world of prints. Schulenberg received her BA in Studio Art from Bowdoin College (Maine), an MA in Printmaking from Purdue University (Indiana), and her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She teaches various printmaking, drawing, and book art courses in her current position.
Schulenberg’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably in Australia, Ireland, Japan, and New Zealand. Her work takes inspiration from observed organic forms, the natural landscape, and her immediate surroundings. At times her work offers the viewer two options simultaneously, presenting images as broad vistas and as microscopic investigations. These “scapes,” as she calls them, may contain a horizon yet offer a view into a smaller, contained environment. More recently, she thinks of her work as a process of building her own “alphabet,” forming visual vocabularies into new and unusual compositions. Formal explorations use her “alphabet” of stripes, humps and stumps, scars, thread, totems, shadows, woven textures, and a torus shape, to name a few. Each composition aims to present a new compilation of visual notations, continually building and rearranging and playing with a growing visual alphabet.