Shelton Walsmith
- May 1, 2025
- 2 min read
Shelton Walsmith is a photographer, collage artist, painter, and draftsman who has exhibited in the United States. Notable exhibitions include venues and collections such as Debevoise collection in Stonington, Connecticut, Gary Hustwit Plexifilm SOHO offices in New York, Virgil Skye Gallery in San Francisco, and Monique Goldstrom Gallery in New York. Recent publications include Texas Architect, Austin American Statesman, Austin Chronicle, Stonington Times, Mystic River Press, Harcourt Brace; and Harvest Books.
Starting his career as an analogue photographer shooting in 35mm, Shelton expanded to painting, drawing, and collage with expressions in disjointed forms. No matter what medium Shelton works in, most of his works have the essence of collage by fusing various elements of different angles or close-up surfaces. His non-figurative photography appears to show manipulations of light and color against surfaces followed by crystalized or glass-like forms. The paintings are often figurative and reflect a tendency to appear like a form of representational cubism and futurism at the same time, expressing a sense of motion and multiple angles simultaneously.
The collages tend to reveal interiors deconstructed to appear almost like inverting or swallowing the form within. Such an eclectic approach through various mediums shows how Shelton always has a desire to experiment with image-making and breaking down his subject into multiple angles and degrees of light and color. Shelton’s drawings are quite intricate and usually straight forward showing direct representation but with scratchy linework and colorful inclinations. His photography seems like his strongest medium, which makes sense considering he started with the artform at the beginning of his career. The photographs express a sense of unification and fragmentation at the same time, the heightened sense of realism yet capturing blurred forms heavily swayed by monochromatic tones reveal character into surfaces and environments.
Channel 60 no.22 (pictured above) appears to show minimalistic depictions of turquoise-colored sharded glass against a grainy surface similar to asphalt, and a blurred foreground and background. The photograph enhances the glass form by offering a focal paint and creating a great sense of unification and dichotomy by blurring both the top and bottom of the photograph, the landscape and horizon, as well as the foreground and background.
Shelton Walsmith studies the intricate nature of surfaces in his abstract works and creates a sense of disjointment with surroundings through figurative depictions. His variety of media and techniques reveals a deep inclination towards deconstruction and the spirit of assemblage and collage throughout his entire body of work, regardless of medium. His explorative and eclectic nature as an artist conveys a great sense of experimentation and evolution towards works quite distant from one another. Shelton Walsmith invokes the spirit of Picasso in his reclamation of various modes of expression and desire to deconstruct form through space, color, perspective, and light.
