Gallery Opening featuring Melissa D. Jones & Loree Harrell

TIB is excited to be featuring a new artist every two months in our Hiker’s Lounge! Come view local artist’s work, purchase your favorite pieces during their feature and celebrate the artist during their gallery opening!

June-July 2026 Featured Artist:
Melissa D. Jones & Loree Harrell

Gallery Opening:
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 from 6:30-8:30pm
in the Hiker’s Lounge at Thunder Island Brewing

About the Artists:

Melissa D. Jones aka Roux Roamer — I’m a traveler, photographer, artist, storyteller, foodie and creative entrepreneur. I live for adventure and new experiences. I’ve photographed my way around all 50 states and 55 countries (still counting!). Sharing adventures to help inspire a world with more roamers. When I’m not roaming the globe I very much enjoy what the Portland area has to offer with scenery and food.

Graduating from Oregon State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. Growing up I always wanted to be an artist and that’s exactly what I’ve done all my life. If it wasn’t drawing, it was teaching myself how to oil paint watching Bob Ross reruns or hand building ceramic bowls and mugs. If it’s an art, I’ve tried it, but I always comes back to my camera. My love of photography started at an early age with a pink 110 film camera. From there I graduated to 35mm where I learned how to develop my own film in middle school. After college I made the switch to digital.

After posting photos on Instagram I started getting requests from people that they wanted to see the scale of the landscapes so I started introducing my environmental self portraits. The ones with the red dress seem to make the most impact and those are the ones I’m most proud of. They tell the best stories. Or maybe it’s the stories behind the images that are the best.

Loree Harrell — Sometimes you can draw a perimeter around a thing and what falls inside is enough. I have lived all of this life in a thirty mile radius of where I sit right now. Thirty miles to the east, thirty miles to the south, thirty miles to the west. Most of the days spent within ten miles of right now. While not unaware or uninterested in what lies beyond, this is where I live, and what forms and feeds my art and my words.

There was a river – there is a river – and a studio in an old school on the side of a road.
There was a tiny house on a scenic highway, much-loved dogs and trees and two more rivers, and, in the background of it all, one fine mountain.
These are what defined, informed, surrounded, held.

In 2000, a writing studio in a classroom in the old Springdale School birthed the next step. One day, in the lull of a story, I was scribbling to get hand and brain moving together, and I saw a glimmer in the scrawl that seemed like it was maybe Something.
The art took over from there like it had just been waiting in the background to be noticed. For the next four years, fifty to a hundred hours a week were spent immersed in ink and oil and acrylic and canvas and paper.

My work is, in the most literal sense, leading. From inception and through each incarnation, the next thing to be done has revealed itself, always unexpectedly, as a new trail to explore. My job is step to step to step and some days you arrive in a place. Inside the perimeter of a thing.

Come celebrate and view their work with us! Cheers