REPRINT FROM THE CLACKAMAS REVIEW

Written by David Stroup Printed June 30, 2004

"Photographer brings her 'Dharma' to Milwaukie's Main Street"

Melissa Skidmore Reardon gave up her lucrative business in Los Angeles to pursue something a little more creative-and this month she will bring her unique perspective to Milwaukie with a show highlighting her take on the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

Reardon, a Milwaukie resident, will be featured at the town's Windhorse Coffee July 15through August 6. Her photographs-of plants, flowers and northwest scenery-are haunting black and white meditations on form and shadow.

"What I am trying to do is to try to bring out some kind of texture," she said. "So that viewers really want to get caught up in it-I'm trying to capture the beauty of the little details."

Born in Portland, Reardon moved to LA a decade ago. "I got into the office furniture industry," she said. "I had a really lucrative career-but it wasn't making me happy-it wasn't creative. I grew up around artists," she said," and I decided that was really more of who I am. I started focusing on my photography again-I'd been doing it since I was a kid."

Now, she said, although she has an art consulting business on the side, "I'm spending even more time doing my photography than in the past." Reardon calls her techniques "Dharma Art".

"The idea behind Dharma Art is that you are capturing what is-not what's expected-what is". To accomplish that she focuses on a number of themes. "My favorite subject matter are architectural details-I shoot a lot in Portland" she said, and she plans on traveling east to take photographs of older buildings.

With her botanical photographs, "they have a really dark background, and I'm capturing the light of the plants." She also takes landscape photographs around the Northwest: "When I 'm out in rural areas-I really try to capture the wilderness-the solitude-of being outside the city. The idea is to capture peace and calm."