Transporting the viewer into intriguing dreamscapes, Monte Shelton displays wonder and mystery of the natural world. Color represents light, light represents energy. Her paintings are concerned with energies that illuminate and emanate in the natural world. This light/energy is the ground in Shelton’s paintings. They permeate physical layers built upon that foundation, creating magical luminosity that reflects the layers of meaning within, representing landscape as metaphor. Shelton’s images are a fusion of observation and imagination, the abstract and descriptive. She blends the tension between light and shadow, the paradox of fire and water, hot and cold, life and death.

Expressive brush work represents energy spots, layering yellows and gold into languid blues and violets. Her paintings play weight against weightlessness, the static against the kinetic, making an original statement about the relationship between matter and energy. As landscape portraits, the acting force is nature itself—wind, rays of light, currents of water, the element of time—the movement is one of mystery, mythology, and the connection of nature and spirituality.