Shawn Dulaney’s paintings are layered constructions of color, spacious abstractions charged with monumental energy. Dulaney spent her childhood on a vast Colorado 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”.

A light-handed mastery of her materials: handmade paints or watercolor, gives us an experience of nature’s power and depth. The alchemy created by the materials and process creates microcosms that relate to the larger macrocosm of the planet: weather patterns, views of landmasses and shorelines, cloud banks and the relationship of these in proximity to each other. The images work like a mnemonic map, we are a part of and not separate from the land we live on.

These are emotional geographies and psychic landscapes, there is a seesaw between the visible and non-visible. Dulaney is inspired by Daoism and Chinese landscape painting and the concept of Emptiness. A state of equilibrium through which one becomes receptive to and attuned with the transforming experience of which one is a part is 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 self, memory and place.

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.”

Dulaney makes handmade paints consisting of acrylic medium and powdered pigments allowing her to get a wide range of saturations and transparencies as they spread out on Venetian plaster and linen. “Her surfaces”, as described by Dominick Lombardi-also of The New York Times, are “exquisitely painted and a pleasure to see.” Her watercolors are saturated pools of flowing color. 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 continues to travel for inspiration and has recently been a two time recipient of the Pink House Artist Residency on the Beara Penninsula in Ireland. Her paintings capture the ephemeral and evoke the Celtic notion of a “thin place”, a place of energy where the veil between this world and the eternal is thin.

A working artist for over 4 decades, Dulaney is represented by Sears Peyton Gallery, Weber Fine Art, Carrie Haddad Gallery and Beth Urdang Gallery. 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). 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. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.