BIO

Shelley Young (b. 1949, Seattle, Washington) is an American painter who lives and works in Bellevue, Washington. Her work fuses surrealism and expressionism. Working primarily in acrylic, she builds dreamlike compositions in which color carries as much meaning as form, a sensibility shaped by two decades in high-end residential design. Painting has been the focus of her practice for more than a decade.

Young's paintings drift between the ancient and the elemental. Relics of lost civilizations resting on the ocean floor, the vast stillness of Antarctic ice, and the fleeting glow of the Aurora Borealis recur as motifs, setting the permanence of matter against the ephemeral. Her work draws on Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Leonor Fini, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Cy Twombly, while the textiles of Jim Thompson, Coraggio, and Manuel Canovas inform her palette.

Young began painting as a teenager. She earned a BFA in painting from the University of Puget Sound in 1971, where her professor, a former student of the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann in New York, introduced her to acrylics. She went on to study at Cornish College of the Arts (1984–1985) and received an Associate Degree in Interior Design from Bellevue Community College in 1997.