Shelley Hull's Gallery

I am a painter living and working in Denver. I studied painting as an undergraduate at Yale University and received my MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

I have been painting for over 30 years and have made all of kinds of artwork throughout the years - paintings based on auto part diagrams, shrine-like constructions with images and objects combined, a series of collage/paintings that I worked on with a colleague, mailing them across country back and forth as we each added bits, collaborating from afar through time and space, riffing on each others' takes.

The last few years I have made landscape paintings of the western landscape. I love the color and light in the west, how the mountains west of Denver change throughout the day. I like to hike and sketch carrying my sketchpad, a small portable watercolor kit, and my camera. Several times a year I take trips to hike and draw in places like Mesa Verde, Moab, Ojo Caliente, Crested Butte, Abiquiu or Taos and these excursions feed my soul and my artistic imagination for months. In between these trips I try to hike around Denver and gather material from these day hikes. Or am inspired by a glance out the light rail window.

Sometimes I find it useful to alter the photos I have taken before using them in the studio. I append photos together to make panoramas; I filter them to get rid of the detail and focus on the larger masses. I will put photos of landscapes or of the painting I'm making as the desktop background on my computer so that I see it as I work on other things; not consciously dwelling on it, but looking nonetheless. I am surprised at the insights that come from this 'inactive looking'. Ahhhh, I need to push the yellows, or emphasize the mass of this area in relation to that, or make sure this section has the most contrast, the painting will be about the larger dark area here vs the smaller strokes there...

I try to keep in mind what a professor (Gretna Campbell) once said, that she liked to push her paintings and make the darkest painting she could make, and still keep it light; the tightest painting she could make and still keep it loose.

I have a web site for my work http://www.shelleyhull.com/ which has more paintings and my resume of exhibiting.