“Fire on a Distant Shore” (2025 By Shelley Joy)
Under the swirling heavens of a delicious season, as if just one step short of delirious in the blazing heat and light of the New York City summer of 2025 I came upon the sheer color forms of Shelley Joy’s (a painter whose very name bespeaks euphoria) non-presupposed cloud barges, sweet to the brink of ripeness’s end in apricots , burgundys, plums and so forth, but never dark. Some of these works offer epic sunsets and others are as if from.a sensorially invigorating menu of eccentric delights.
In “Fire on a Distant Shore” Shelley Joy exhibits an extreme sensitivity to chromatics. In this painting she unleashes riptides of fiery golden orange hues as part of a burning hot sunset in waves of the spectrum in all of its attendant splashes, plum, pomegranate, grenadine, vermillion, violet, and into lavender.etc.
More than this, this canvas is as if a study in elapsed time, catching light in instantaneousness as was the aim of some of the Impressionists. Meanwhile, the work simultaneously travels into the later sunset wherein dark plum will eventually purple and then to the earlier sunset when its lightness offers up streamers of violet and lavender.
As if this summer to take a cue from William Butler Yeats one might.have been “sailing to delirium” as if Joy had hung the heavens there, with bright single colors confluencing in the mind with shades of a twilight sky. Her streamers for day-dreamers are as pure color which really need no words, just a feeling of burning up in the motion of existsnce while gilded by the majesty of light.
Lee Klein
2025