Shawn Dulaney’s paintings are layered constructions of color, spacious abstractions charged with monumental energy. Dulaney spent her childhood on a vast plateau looking west to the Rocky Mountains and has traveled widely, immersing herself in landscape. Her work captures the experience and feeling of place. Doug McClemont of ArtNews writes that Dulaney’s paintings “concern the earth, and the unyielding hand of nature”.

These are emotional geographies, reflected in her waves of color washes; overflowing, colliding, exhaling, intertwining. Movement in the making and in the images relates to her early background in dance and to the history of humans making marks in an archetypal way. In this sense these are bodily landscapes that reflect the collective unconscious and the universal experiences that are inherent to the human experience. These are also landscapes as self portraits, topobiographies involving memory and place like mnemonic maps.

Her work has been described by William Zimmer of The New York Times as belonging to “a very strong tradition, that of 19 th -century Northern European Romanticism in which nature was seen as corresponding to human emotional states.” He says of her work, “Ms. Dulaney makes it clear that her inner life is very much a part of each painting, and this alone distinguishes it from most abstraction…Shawn Dulaney is deliberately out for grandeur, but she is also out for intimacy. Her paintings take advantage of their innate ambiguity and declare themselves to be very current in the thinking that lies behind them.”

A light-handed mastery of her materials: water media on linen or paper, form microcosms that gives us an experience of nature’s power and depth. “Her surfaces”, as described by Dominick Lombardi-also of The New York Times, are “exquisitely painted and a pleasure to see.” Dulaney says, “I explore flows of liquid pigment and develop the ways in which these streams and lakes of chance-derived marks reflect meaning in the larger cosmos.”

Dulaney has recently been a two-time recipient of the Pink House Artist Residency on the Beara Penninsula in Ireland. Her work will appear in 3 consecutive exhibitions this year at the new Savage Wonderground Gallery and Art Center in Beacon, NY. A working artist for over 4 decades, Dulaney is represented by Sears Peyton Gallery, Weber Fine Art, Carrie Haddad Gallery and Beth Urdang Gallery. Her work has appeared on the cover of Architectural Digest magazine (2022), has been reviewed in ArtNews and The New York Times, and has been featured in Parabola and New American Paintings. Exhibited widely, her paintings can be found in extensive public and private collections including those of the Hunterdon Museum of Art in NJ, the Venetia Resort in China, JCrew in NYC, as well as in the private collections of author Annie Proulx, actor Steve Buscemi, talk-show host Conan O’Brian and musician Stuart Copeland. Her work has appeared in episodes of TV’s Enlightened, Portlandia, Severance, and Sex & the City, and the films It’s Complicated (2009), Interview (2007) and John Wick 3 (2019). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.