beneath beauty Painting

Shelly is a visual artist, raised in South Africa, of Israeli origin and now working from her studio in North London. She completed a Law degree in South Africa and is a self taught artist who turned her attention to painting after a career in the City of London, alongside having 3 children. Her shimmering paired back colour field paintings explore a process of mixing unconventional materials together to create a surface where glitter, paint and pigment particles coalesce to incantatory effect. In fusing colour and reflective particles on the canvas the artist is reminded of her move from South Africa to London and the deep impact a change in light and colours had on her emotional state. Her paintings aim to capture the powerful emotive qualities of colour. The aesthetic experience is one where the paintings are devoid of figurative content. The paired back colour delivers a portal to at once loose and find oneself. The viewer looks, there is nothing to see but a shimmering colour field, so the focus shifts internally to experience how it feels. Reducing the work to colour, materiality, and light opened the artist up to new ideas and ways of thinking about making. She experimented with tools such as airbrush, spray guns, flake guns and a variety of fabrics and developed an approach where thin veils of colour are lightly sprayed over the prepared substrate. As the spray hits the ground, the colour fuses with the glittering particles beneath and the surface is transformed into a bed of colour, light and shine. Some paintings are embellished with emojis. The language of emojis is like that of colours; they both communicate without words. Other paintings are transformed into a woven version of themselves. Initially the idea of the weave arose out of the desire to repurpose paintings with flawed surfaces and the impetus to take ideas further which is embedded in her practice as a self taught artist.