I have a memory of when I was about 2 years old, I lived in that bigness.  I knew it to be me, and it felt like luminous brightness full of wonder and unlimited possibility and connection to everything.  I remember standing in my crib and my father was with me, but he was distracted by something so his attention wasn’t on me.  This terrified me because I thought he couldn’t see me in who I was being and if he couldn’t see me, he wouldn’t take care of me.  In fact, I believed I would be cut off into dark space if I didn’t do something so he could see me.  So, I turned away from my bigness and luminous brightness and immediately started to defer to him for who I should be.  I lost my truth that day.  There were many other experiences in childhood when I chose a false version of myself out of fear of being rejected or tossed out.  These were wounds against my true nature and in truth I believe similar wounds are a part of everyone’s human journey.    

We have two sides of ourselves.  Our true nature and purpose (why we came here) and our victim stories that are about staying safely hidden.  I’ve heard the stories that came from our wounding called many things like a separation from love, the hero’s journey, the maya, the illusion and more.  Essentially, this is what I paint about, the truth of who we really are in the complexity of our wounded selves, our bigness and our wholeness in both.    

I paint about what it looks like for specific individuals with my Pure Essence Power Portraits where I actually go back to my innocence and my connection to all things by using my intuition, psychic ability and superconscious to I tap into someone’s greatness or genius as well as their victim identities and with the intention of using the information to celebrate, guide and empower them, I create a portrait to support them on their journey of living from their heart.   

I also paint about the feminine on a larger cultural scale as expressed as women, nature and authentic creativity as these are expressions of the uncontainable and uncontrollable feminine aspect in everyone.  It represents inclusiveness, vulnerability, intuition, connection and exuberance – a receiving of the bigness that exists in us already but has been overshadowed.  While honoring the feminine, I feel strongly about addressing the often-unnoticed hand of dominance and control being a form of a dysfunctional masculine model that has cut out the feminine through an entrenched ideology that has undervalued, dismissed, oppressed and ignored it out of fear.   

I grew up with a father who didn’t understand how to see me and value me as an individual person with autonomy and my own personal power nor was my mother supported in that way.  In fact, she was given downers by her doctors because they had no context or protocol for dealing with her depression and she died very young because of this.  This of course left me not being validated in a way that I needed and so now, I feel strongly about providing inspirational art to empower women to be fierce about what’s uniquely true for them, to hold complexity with an open heart, to maintain strong boundaries with a fierce heart and to live a life from their one true wild heart.   

I am creating a body of work to speak about all of this on a larger cultural scale touching on identity and individual creative expression.  I address gender, race, color and sexual orientation.  Much of my work is oil on canvas but I also use mixed media on various grounds to express the layered complexity of mistaken identity.  I have original art available on paper, canvas and board and I offer prints of most of my paintings on a variety of beautiful surfaces like archival paper, natural wood, metal and acrylic.  In addition, I offer the Pure Essence Power Portrait for anyone, especially women, who are ready to truly honor and celebrate their true essence.   

Making art to express my wisdom and passion has always been an obvious choice for me.  It always seemed natural to me.  I was good with my hands and loved color and texture.  Plus, I can never remember not believing I was an artist.  I just didn’t realize I had the freedom and power to make it happen in my own life and out in the world.  I had been waiting for permission or for the universe to open up and say, here, Shelly, you are an artist and here is your opportunity to make art.  I didn’t have a strong enough sense of self in my family of origin to claim my desire to be an artist and to ask for support in that venture.    

When I finally got it that I was going to have to make it happen it was when I created a painting of my niece who was about 12 at the time.  I was in a marriage where I felt manipulated and controlled and basically treated like the brilliance of me was to be managed and controlled for someone else’s pleasure and consumption, ideally a man’s and I all too eagerly had signed up.  My relationship with my husband reflected how I saw myself with my parents waiting to be seen and validated.  What transpired out of me painting the painting of my niece was a realization that I had been pushing down my creative essence for fear it was too much, too messy, too exuberant.     

At the time, I was aware there was something I wanted to protect in my nieces and my daughters and what was evident in the painting for me was it was youthful, feminine exuberance.   It was in my girls, and it was in me, and I wanted to protect and honor it.  I even created a small collection of high-end dresses and separates from prints made from this painting.    

In fact, I really love fashion as well as art for how they both reflect the culture in any given time and place.  No matter how variant the culture and time period, there is a common thread of the human experience.  This is fascinating to me and why I love articulating the human form in paint or any 2D medium because there is a layered nuance available in a body, a face, a gesture or a hand or even hair, a hat, a jacket or a dress.  The familiarity of the everyday can launch a thousand stories of the wondrous strange to be held in a single second.  

It is my purpose to bring the truth of life to a single second when you view one of my paintings and your whole world expands and you see the truth of who you are, connected to it all, loved without limits and powerful beyond measure.

My art business has been designated as a "Trusted Art Seller" with The Art Storefronts Organization, which means you can shop with confidence, and know that I stand behind the quality and value of my products.