C
olorado native, Shawn Demarest (www.shawndemarest.com), spent a total of one
month, two weeks at the end of 2018, studying Mojave National Preserve through a
painter’s eye. The artist comes to the Desert Light Gallery via Portland, Oregon, a place
she currently calls home. Her most recent theme entitled “Urbanscape” includes several paintings
dating back to 2010 in which she explores the effects of water on pavement as well as the twilight
of day. She writes, “I can’t help but paint wet streets, highlights and power lines.” The near decade-
long sequence of images reveals an artist finding her voice.
In some of the pieces the urban landscape is photorealistic in others they tease the viewer into
thinking the artist is becoming an impressionist and in others, we are reminded of Hopper’s works,
a cross between realism and fantasy. The culmination of this series came in 2015 when Shawn
began to incorporate continuous pencil lines into the studio paintings. She calls them a “scaffold
layer of boundary lines.” The resulting geometric shapes provide structure over the wet streets
freeing the image from its urban reality. Here, the playfulness of Hopper is bound by Cubism that
harkens to Rivera or Picasso.
“ What appeared
monochromatic
from the road
quickly became a
living quilt. ”
In the current exhibition at the Desert Light Gallery, “Aiken to
Zzyzx” Demarest has brought all of her skills, honed in the urban
environment
of
Portland, to the vast
landscapes of Mojave
National Preserve.
A self-proclaimed,
“Place-Based Artist”
her observations are often captured through memory
or by returning to a location over a period of time to
add layers to an image until the piece is completed or
using photo reference in her Oregon studio.
During one of her forays into the desert Demarest
left her car behind and wandered into the rabbitbrush
covered earth where butterflies fluttered, birds
chirped, and the hyper purples, oranges, and yellows
of desert flowers provided imagery for the olfactory
senses. She says it was here that she grew smitten with
Mojave. “What appeared monochromatic from the
road quickly became a living quilt of life,” she writes.
As I’ve written before, Mojave can overwhelm the
artist who is unprepared and seeking a voice. It is the
skilled artist who thrives in landscapes of opportunity.
Demarest shows us she is a proficient painter and does
not shy away from the challenge the desert can bring.
Using knowledge gained from the decade’s long work
of Urbanscape she captures the desert in much the
One Palm
6
THE DESERT LIGHT
|
May/Jun 2018