Elizabeth Shull
Featured Artist
Volume One, Issue Three, “Plein Air,” Visual Art
How do we interpret our unique experiences with our dynamic environment?
Having lived in California my entire life, it seems natural that my work would explore the natural world, revealing its sensory magic. The journey begins by gathering images in my head while out and about. It actually becomes a memory game as I rarely take photographs and try to absorb everything I am seeing at that moment. A certain image may trigger a series of memories. A particular thought will very often have a powerful “air” about it, authenticating itself, and from there an idea for a drawing or painting comes about.
This past Fall, when the wildfires were raging, I wanted to document my reaction to the ubiquitous and unending smoke. It was such a powerful combination of tragedy and beauty. Over a couple of weeks I was captivated by observing the air quality as it slowly began to clear. Having been through the huge Woolsey Fire two years prior I knew, in time, the sky would turn blue again, we would be able to breathe, and begin to see signs of rejuvenation. It took a long time and gave me plenty of imagery to reflect on and draw. I was captivated by the process, all the time reflecting on whether this would indeed be the new normal. Fires in Southern California have been documented for a couple hundred years. They are seasonal and usually timed with the Santa Ana Winds. We now experience a longer more intense fire season for several reasons, mainly drought and increased population in at risk areas.
The journey I take while working on each drawing allows me to get lost in the process and completely explore the revelation of what the natural world presents.
As the California fire season overlapped with the coronavirus pandemic, artist Elizabeth Shull’s drawing practice of nature gained a new dimension. The blazes coated much of Los Angeles’ air in unhealthy amounts of smoke and ash, giving residents like Shull another reason to stay inside. Her colored pencil encapsulates the multicolored haze that dotted pictures on social media, whether from news sources or friends and relatives. The muddled appearance literally mimics the dangerous levels of smoke and ash that coated the air of Los Angeles for days in the fall of 2020.
The lack of titles adds to the sense of anonymity the works evoke. They are clearly California in the context of a particular moment but lack the typical markers of the Golden State, save the palm tree in #7. This is not the Hollywood Sign or the Golden Gate Bridge, crashing waves on the endless beaches, or a shot of hiking in Yosemite. It is more normal, reflecting the reality of the state rather than a touristic or kitschy ideal.
The layers of pencil also resemble the impasto of oils in Impressionist Plein air painting of the nineteenth century, whether Claude Monet’s hazy views of the Rouen Cathedral or Camille Pissarro’s snow-covered villages. These canvases each investigate something mundane and quotidian, fixtures of life in the city or the country with hints of industrialization’s growing effects on one’s surroundings.
In the present day, Shull undercuts any familiarity with a stereotypical view of Southern California by portraying the landscape as it is affected by extreme weather and climate change — expanding the category of everyday to nature’s dangerous force, perhaps, even too present to be sublime. While Monet sought the tempestuous waves breaking on the rocks at Belle-Île from precarious vantage points, for Shull, the natural doom gradually transforms the atmosphere from the commonplace to an extraordinary precarity. She captures nature in reaction to an abnormal, even an unnatural amount of smoke and fire in her small-scale drawings; the height and width never exceed 7 inches in either direction. Their miniature size emphasizes the repetitious presence of smoke infiltrating daily life, even Shull’s artistic practice of sketching in the open air.
While the air is now unwelcoming and polluted, transforming reality into what could seem to be bleak, eerie, or petrifying, Shull’s work as a whole still seems to carry an underlying tone of hope. The color from the first drawing to the last shifts from oranges, yellows, and blacks to include blue as the skies cleared, the haze dissipated, and the fires were contained and put out. The skies of Los Angeles are becoming known as much for blue clarity as grey smoke, and Elizabeth Shull captures the beauty, the terror, and the nuance of all of these views.
- Jenna Wendler
Elizabeth Shull was born and raised in Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. As a painter her predominant intention is to encourage visual exploration and trigger thinking beyond the predictable. Elizabeth received an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds an MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has participated in many exhibitions and her work is held in select private collections. More of her work can be found here.