Her affinity for vibrant color often feels celebratory, occasionally foreboding, and always delivered with brushstrokes that communicate the tension of a coiled spring. From her text-like, yet indecipherable compositions come mysterious messages as stories built of color and form that supplant the need for recognizable symbols. 

Melissa Meyer approaches her paintings as a dance. Viewing her canvases from above gives her the freedom to navigate the perimeters as she improvises. She rejects the term Action Painting to describe her, but her good friend, the late painter and teacher Thomas Nozkowski, called her unique method “painting without a net.” Though her work emerges from activity and movement, upon viewing her oeuvre, it can seem to be a meditation or an inquiry into what it is to revisit shapes and lines because similar iterations appear repeatedly. Though without marked conclusion, one always feels it could be around the next corner—compelling us to keep looking while always being presented with something new to contemplate.

 In addition to works that incorporate a lot of color, Meyer has created a sizable collection of black and white pieces. In the ten-year period between 1984 and 1994, she replicated the colorful work she’d done earlier in the day in black and white in order to examine and better understand its structure. Her artistic exploration has also taken her into working with watercolors, in which she has foregone the use of white paint entirely, using the whiteness of the paper instead.