Artist bio: Scandinavian heritage since the medieval ages, Rebecca Meloy's matrix of immigrant Finnish farmers, rugged pioneering modern Viking Norwegians, and ten generations of devout Swedish Lutheran ministers, has instilled her visual voice with a strong connection to the environment. A life long painter, the 1960s rural Oregon Willamette Valley farmland and tumultuous family of origin encouraged a solitary self reliance and strong work ethic having harvested crops as a child to help feed America. Thus inspired, her diverse art has juxtaposition: light to dark, calmness to energy, nature's textures, motion to emotion, and change. From abstraction to realism, her paintings and linoleum block prints are well crafted. Having also been influenced by her time studying at Cornish College of the Arts, in recent years she is more prolific than ever. In 2022 she opened Meloy Gallery in the Heart of Bellingham's Art District where she features regional artists' works as well as her own and has created over 100 earth/land focused drawings, paintings, and prints. A highlight in her career has been the one-woman exhibitions at the Seattle Nordic Heritage Museum and at the Aula Gallery at the University of Helsinki in 2004. Her art has been influence by instructors Sherry Markovitz, Kathleen Rabel, John Overton, Charles Stokes, Sarah Clark-Langager, Robert Yoder, Nori Saito, and at Western Washington University with Tom Johnston, among others. Via workshops, she has studied with local artists Karen Guzak, Pam Ingalls, and Richard Steiner from Japan. Most recently her associations with fellow Seattle artists Joe Reno, Lisa Sheets, and Joan Stuart Ross has encouraged her tenacity in continuing to forge an ongoing path forward. Her art has been seen across the US in a myriad of juried exhibitions; was in the 2023 live MONA auction; and recently featured by CoCA in a exhibition of 38 new works at its' venue the GMS/Gary Manuel Salon in Pioneer Square. She has received residencies at Nelimarrka Museum in Alajarvi Finland, Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, and Sou'wester on the Washington Coast. Rebecca has instinctively been a life-long artist, not a degreed university graduate. From 1996 to 2004 she owned and managed Meloy & Company Gallery in Fairhaven, Bellingham. However, beginning in 2005 she became a sole proprietor handy woman with carpentry and landscape -- having studied with Ron Rule at the University of British Columbia. In 2008 he went on to graduate from the Bellingham Votech as a Carpenter/Construction Manager having studied with Paul Washington. Then she journeyed as a Master Carpenter from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America where she was trained to build freeway bridges and university structures around our state with corporations such as Mowat, Tiger, Ebanal, Dawson, Turner, Skanska, and Sellen working on UW at WWU buildings, the floating bridge pontoons, the Snoqualmi Pass Animal Crossing, and a series of bridges at the entrance of the Seattle underground tunnel.