Born in Washington, D.C., in 1952, Shelley Laffal began her art training in 1971 at the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore. Traveling to Sasketchewan, Canada, she studied with Canadian artist Ernest Lindner at The Emma Lake Art Community and at the California Institute of The Arts (Cal Arts), in Valencia, California, with painter Paul Brach (husband of Miriam Shapiro).
After years of roaming the back streets of Santa Fe and Key West, and living in Costa Rica, Laffal found the moody colors and emotional intensity of Latin culture infusing her work - an influence that's still evident today.
In 1986 she returned to the nation's capital, where she spent a decade exploring sculpture as a way of extending her visual vocabulary. Developing a series of large scale garment/shrowd sculptures whose intricately painted surfaces and dramatic fossal-like female forms became her trademark. But her need to tell a more intimate and less abstract story inspired her to seriously explore figurative painting.
Current Work Portrait Fiction. In my new oil paintings I try to merge the contemporary human experience with the primitive, hidden part of us that seems headed for extinction. I explore ways to express the viceral self and to provoke and reveal something true and beautiful.
