“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.”
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, topo biographies involving memory and place like mnemonic maps.