(Left) Living in Grace: the Gift. (Right) Root: the host. Shellie Lewis Crisp, artist
By Gina Malone
Shellie Lewis Crisp began her painting journey as a way to heal. When her family life was hectic running three restaurants and raising two sons, painting served as a means of therapy. A pursuit she had loved as an imaginative child moving from place to place with her military family and that led her to the College of Charleston to study with noted artists Michael Tyzack and Manning Williams had become peripheral until 2010. “During a season of deep personal transition, after separation and eventually divorce, I retreated into a focused, six-month period of non-stop painting,” she says. “It was here that I realized painting was my safe place, my therapist, my retreat from my crazy world—it’s the way I process life and search for my purpose, and I eventually found my way back to myself.”
Behold: a messenger. Shellie Lewis Crisp, artist
Today, she compares how she works to keeping a spiritual journal. “Every piece starts with the written word—prayers or verses that serve as the soul of the work, journals or quotes and deep thoughts to stay hidden,” she says. For her, art offers solitude, time to talk to God and a safe place for her own healing and recovery. “I paint because I have to; it is how I breathe, how I pray and how I invite others to see that, even in the darkness, the light is always finding its way in.”
Her work, she says, has evolved throughout her career from a place of exploration of techniques and subjects to a confident mission to help others find hope in their own lives. “I paint to connect, hoping that my visual journey helps others process their own struggles and find beauty in the messy, in the darkness and the mysterious corners of life,” she says.
Shortly after that self-imposed commitment to painting 16 years ago, she found her professional standing as an artist when Ann DerGara and Tom Cabe of Red Wolf Gallery in Brevard offered to represent her work. “I had emerged from my basement with a body of work that felt raw and new, and their belief in my vision gave me the confidence to keep exploring and painting intuitively,” she says.
DerGara calls Crisp’s work “mesmerizing,” and says, “Her paintings draw you into them as you wonder what these girls are looking at or questioning.”
Shellie shares her life with husband Jamie Crisp, a bass player who, she says, inspires her daily. “I am profoundly grateful for the life we’ve built, my two boys, my family and the friends who have become family,” she adds.
Working her way into her art emotionally and spiritually has taught her lessons along the way. “I learned what a boundary was and how to draw it,” she says. “I learned I can trust my intuition and gut. I learned I made many mistakes, but also that I could forgive myself. I learned to think through and finish something, not be discouraged or afraid that what I am sharing is divinely guided.”
Those lessons have found their way onto the canvas as well. “In my art, I don’t aim for perfection,” she says. “I aim for the honest ‘cracks’—the layers of paint I strip away and the ‘imperfections’ I choose to expose. The patches and scratches and marks—these all build a surface where an image will appear. I have recently been digging into metaphors and symbols to paint a story of a woman who is determined to heal her vessel. Her cracks are where I find His goodness.”
I Spy. Shellie Lewis Crisp, artist
She works primarily in oils, incorporating collage and mixed media and painting on wood blocks or panels. Sometimes she uses found objects in her pieces as a way of adding history to the narrative. “The process of my creations begin,” she says, “with writing, sketching randomly and rhythmically, applying various marks and splotches of paint; then I apply and remove paint to reveal images, developing them to my liking. This process may take minutes, hours or weeks to complete.”
A recent work titled First Place signifies, for her, spiritual balance—“choosing to put the divine and the self at the forefront after years of carrying the weight of the world. I stopped settling for what didn’t answer my internal fight to be whole, or deserving to feel right in my soul,” she says. “I finally had the belief in myself, one strong enough to fight to be seen, to push through the crowd and touch His hem.”
In essence, she says, “Art transcends, art inspires and art can speak to our souls.”
Find Shellie Lewis Crisp’s work at regional galleries including Red Wolf Gallery in Brevard, located at 8 East Main Street. Learn more at RedWolfGalleryNC.com.
