Urban Scenes: An Art Portfolio by Shawn Demarest
Powell Paint, oil and graphite on panel
Shawn Demarest’s painting portfolio focuses on urban scenes, viewed through rain-coated or fogged windshields and windows. The artist’s works seem to paradoxically offer a sense of warmth by showcasing stormy, snowy, and chilly scenes as something seen through a protective barrier.
I really like seeing the contrast between daytime and nighttime scenes in Shawn’s portfolio. The artist’s portrayals of busy city streets at dusk or in nighttime often take saturated, electric blue and navy hues as their basis, blending in tones of red, yellow, and green to create the look of street lamps diffused by water and air, reflecting off slick asphalt.
Available works from Shawn's ongoing City series
As we saw in our previous feature of Shawn’s moody portraits of urban streets, and in some of the artist’s recent works, Shawn’s work with abstract compositions and forms sometimes merges into her figurative paintings. Works depicting cars and streets are overlaid with translucent shapes that distort and refract the forms of the painting, calling to mind the refraction of water droplets like the works of Ben Reeves.
