Courtlyn Sholten

Several of your recent paintings feel almost like frozen moments from a film, with a strong sense of atmosphere and psychological tension. What attracts you to translating cinematic imagery into painting?

I love film, specifically horror films. They feel so nostalgic. I try to capture that nostalgic, scared feeling in my pieces when you look at them. I want my pieces to give off the uneasiness feeling you get watching a suspenseful scene in a movie. You want to look away but you’re captured in the moment.

When you work with an already recognizable figure or visual reference, how do you transform it so that the finished painting carries your own artistic voice rather than simply reproducing the source?

I work off of reference photos, but my goal isn’t to make a photorealistic copy on a canvas. I want my pieces to look like paintings rather than photos. My Pennywise piece specifically, I did not want a detailed background, I wanted the only focus to go to Pennywise himself. My artistic voice is portrayed in my brush strokes and more stylized composition rather than photorealism.

Your portraits often seem to exist somewhere between realism and something more unsettling or surreal. How important is that sense of ambiguity to you?

That sense of ambiguity is my focus when working on these type of portraits. The main feeling I want to portray is uneasiness in these pieces. I want them to give off the same feeling you get watching a good, scary movie but from a 2D, still frame. Landing stylistically somewhere between photorealism and surrealism helps give off that liminal space feeling that enhances an unsettled feeling when looking at my pieces.

Blue appears very prominently in these works, especially in the skin tones, while deep reds and dark backgrounds create a strong contrast. What role does color play in establishing the emotional atmosphere of your paintings?

There is a huge correspondence between color and psychology. The hues of blue I used in these pieces can invoke feelings of sterileness, unapproachableness, and create a feeling of unease / harshness. Paired with the feelings that the red hues portray; stress, raised heart rate, and can create a sense of urgency. Looking at these intense colors side by side can affect people physically and mentally, which helps create that liminal, uneasy atmosphere that I hope to portray with these pieces.

There is a theatrical quality to these compositions – the curtains, dramatic lighting, costumes, poses, and carefully controlled backgrounds. Are you consciously thinking about staging when you build a painting?

Typically, prior to starting a piece I will make a mockup of how I want things staged in my paintings. Occasionally I’ll see a reference I want to use and think the background looks right in reference / mockup but once the subject matter is on a canvas it looks out of place, so I’ll improvise to make the main subject matter pop.

You have experience both creating personal studio work and painting murals for public spaces. Does working at a large architectural scale change the way you think about composition when you return to canvas?

Murals are still new to my resume; I have at this time done 3 murals and am currently working on my 4th. Doing murals has made a difference in the way I measure proportions whether that’s on a wall or canvas. Making proportions on such a large scale is a difficult task, but the more I do murals, the more my proportions on any piece are more accurate.

You describe becoming completely absorbed once an idea takes hold. What usually tells you that an idea is strong enough to become a painting rather than simply remaining an interesting image or thought?

If I can’t stop thinking about the way a painting would look like on a wall, I know that my idea needs to be on canvas. Sometimes I’ll have an idea that I think would make a good painting so I’ll draw it up on a canvas but looking at it, the idea may not translate well on a large scale or may not be translated well in acrylics. If that happens, I’ll make that idea into a sketchbook drawing and move onto my next idea.