Painting is my passion, and art my seducer. The four sides of the untouched canvas set the stage for courtship.
Shawn Nelson Dahlstrom is a Cape Cod artist who combines crisp realism with elements of abstract expressionism. While the artist’s paintings are clearly representational, colors and shapes play across the canvas in a bold and innovative manner, setting her paintings apart from conventional landscapes.
As representational works, Shawn Dahlstrom’s paintings translate the three-dimensional, natural world to the confines of the two-dimensional canvas through the skillful suggestion of depth. Yet Shawn Dahlstrom's paintings are also distinctively modern, and indeed abstract, in their masterful creation and inter-relationship of color, shape, and positive and negative space. In representing nature, while at the same time drawing our attention to the formal elements that structure our perception of it, Shawn Dahlstrom's paintings evoke such American painters as Sam Feinstein (1915-2003), Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), and Wolf Kahn (b. 1927).
Shawn Dahlstrom's relationship to these earlier artists is strong. She studied with Sam Feinstein, the noted teacher and painter whose outstanding body of work was the subject of a retrospective at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in 2008. Sam Feinstein was himself the student of Hans Hofmann, master of abstract expressionism, famed educator, and subject of an essay by artist Frank Stella (b.1936) titledThe Artist of the Century. Shawn Nelson also studied with Wolf Kahn, who was also a student of Hans Hofmann and an assistant in Hofmann’s Provincetown studio. Like Shawn Dahlstrom, a long-time resident of Cape Cod, these influential artists were all inspired by the natural beauty of the Cape.
A graduate of Boston University and the Massachusetts College of Art, Shawn Dahlstrom has taught classes at the Cape Cod Museum of Art since 2001. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Shawn Dahlstrom has exhibited her work widely in galleries and museums in New York and throughout New England. Her works are included in the permanent collections of such museums as the Cape Cod Museum of Art (Dennis, MA), Duxbury Art Museum (Duxbury, MA), and Heritage Museum (Sandwich, MA), as well as in many private collections.
For more information, please visit Shawn Nelson Dahlstrom's Website or call her directly at 508.509.3171.
To download a review of Shawn Dahlstrom's one-woman show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in August of last year, please click here: Download ShawnNelson at CCMA Wins Acclaim 8 11 09