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traveling & painting & petting cats

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Artist Bio

Shelby K Cook was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where the west coast landscape of mountains and forests fostered a lifelong love of nature. She studied fine art in college, earning her BFA from Western Washington University along with a BA in Art History. After graduating, Cook moved to Seattle, WA, where she continues to paint and run her studio practice. Traveling when able, she brings her portable easel to paint en plein air wherever she goes.

Artist Statement

Focused on using painting as a way to retain and revisit memories, Shelby draws inspiration from her travels and experiences. A connection to nature stemming from a childhood love of forests means she seeks interesting environments to inspire her, allowing her recollections of a place to alter the image as she paints in order to tangibly capture memories. She is focused on exploring the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit, trying to capture liminal spaces and transitional moments. Nostalgia plays a large role, and she uses photos she has taken while traveling as well as photographs from her past as a starting point for her pieces.

Find Me

Portfolio

Overgrown

These pieces are a callback to Shelby's college thesis consisting of large pieces depicting tangled, dense forests as a metaphor for personal barriers. Now, instead of forests, she's captured shrubs in full blossom that still are dense webs of leaves and petals, revisiting the metaphor to show her own personal growth and blooming.

Hebrides & Highlands

A collection of 9 original paintings inspired by the artist's trip to Scotland in November, 2019. These pieces act as a visual journal: follow her travels from Inverness, through the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Skye, then back up into the Highlands to the cute cottage of Killiehuntly in Cairngorms National Park.