Shelley Himmelstein's art is an intimate exploration into painting in its purest aspects. It is concerned with the emotional impact of color, the plane of the canvas, and infinite variations in the arrangement of the color masses on this plane. At the same time, her paintings comment on the artist's own experience and environment, presented through unpopulated landscapes and cityscapes. Her works refer to particular places that are meaningful to her for the feelings they evoked when she encountered them. The canvases register the chosen "locales" in New York City, where she lives, and take us along on her travels in the two countries that she loves, the United States and Italy.

This double allegiance to American and European culture is manifest not only in the subject matter, but also in the stylistic influences on Shelley's art. Her early education at the Barnes Foundation introduced her to the prime works of Matisse and the Post-Impressionists which taught her first-hand about the liberation of color from natural forms and set the foundation for her to appreciate 20th-century artists including Mondrian and de Staël. American modernists, such as Marsden Hartley and Milton Avery, gave her confidence in the validity of her own experience as an expression of a genuine American character.

Shelley paints from nature, but simplifies its forms to the point of abstraction. Color is her primary means of expression, and she uses it with skill and invention. Her color planes are arranged parallel to the surface of the picture, drawing attention to the inherent flatness of the canvas. They also emphasize the limits of this surface, their potential expanse being necessarily cut off by the borders of the picture.

The artist's color combinations are never uniform, they vary from painting to painting depending on the mood she seeks to convey. Sometimes she uses strong contrasts of primaries and their complementaries, as in Wayland Turn and in From the Train 1 sometimes, slight variations in tone of closely related hues as in Rovigo (From the Train 3) and in At the Road's Turn. Drawing is also present in Shelley's work, but it is limited to details that identify a particular site - bushes in Verso Venafro, tree trunks in Red Pines, buildings in At the Road's Turn and From the Train 1.

Like all good art, Shelley's work defies neat categorizations. It is optical in its emphasis on color and overall composition, but it is also preoccupied with the physicality of paint, its tactility and texture that is always present in the thick crust of either a single pigment or the multiple layers of variegated ones, made visible through globules and scratches on the surface. Shelley's art is neither figurative, nor abstract; neither sublime, nor pastoral. It explores painterly possibilities of a work, but it does not discount the line completely; it is based on a very personal life experience, but it is also about the laws and the limits of painting; it is rooted in nature, but comments on culture. The resistance to being pigeonholed testifies to this work's openness, integrity, and ability to evolve in new and unexpected directions.

October 1996