Megan Shay is a painter and photographer born in Ithaca, NY in 1965, living and working between Ithaca and Tampa, FL.  In her luminous landscapes and poetic portraits of natural elements, Shay reveals her belief that a close connection with nature fosters emotional and physical well-being. Her large scale pastel paintings defy the dry nature of the medium with juicy, rich color applied in serene sweeps that hold the landscape in a space between realism and abstraction.  Her photography, in contrast, delves into detail, leading the viewer into meditations through larger than life studies of a single subject such as a lichen on a tree trunk or a fallen blossom on a sidewalk. 

Shay’s life-long, detailed study of nature has made her a believer in complexity and inter-connectedness.  She moves from camera to pastel sketch to iPad to canvas, from macro to micro, from industrial to natural, from more representational to more abstract but her work seems to swirl us into thematic cohesion through her series, her use of scale to collar the viewer into a deeper engagement and her characteristic use of vertical imagery.  Her work is constantly layering the impact of humans on environment, the struggle of spirit and soul, the process of reducing or abstracting form, how the artist introduces and imposes narrative on objects and the creation of personal iconography through repetition and series.

Now a world traveler, Shay’s process is dictated as much by where she is physically as what she is working on intellectually.  With access to her studios less than half the year, her camera and iPad are both means of placing temporary markers for future studio work and creating finished work.  She is constantly moving through images for the present and the future, as fine art and as notations that allow her to recreate the near past when she gets into the studio.  Because her studio time is brief and split between Ithaca and Florida, her painting process is fast and overlapped.  She starts her paintings on the road by sorting photographic references and documentary material into files that support a studio painting and then uses her iPad to paint pieces that work out palettes, formal structure and process.  Once she accesses a studio, she produces a blast of 10 minute sketches in pastel on commercial sandpaper based on the prework she did while traveling.  From these, she selects two images and sets up 18”x28” papers side by side on a large, wall-mounted board.  After she produces a drawing, she uses an alcohol wash to set the darks and fill in the paper tooth.  Working back and forth between the two paintings with four sets of pastels in varying hardnesses or acrylic gouache, she completes the work in two or three days and resets her boards with the next two paper canvases.

All her life, Shay has spent summers in Maine.  Artists who have worked in Maine played an outsize role in her artistic awareness as she came of “art-age” in the late 1980’s.  Louise Nevelson, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Marsden Hartley, the three generations of Wyeths and the Zorachs tumbled around her mind creating a warp and weft of abstraction and realism.  Further interest in minimalists Robert Irwin, Donald Judd and Agnes Martin and media mixers like Warhol, Picasso, Beuys, Kieffer and Hockney fed a dynamic of the highly conceptual and the totally expedient.  Additionally, because Shay trained and worked as a sculptor, she never felt she knew how to draw well enough to paint.  For forty years she parsed her photography into fine art and reference photos to save for a time when she might be able to learn to draw and paint.  

Until recently, Shay always considered herself a writer first and an artist second.  Her background in creative writing and poetry now finds a place in her work in two ways, as titles and in the need to work in series to extend and flesh out her narratives.  Not only does her FLX Train series recreate the experience of taking the train through upstate NY with views of Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge followed by a Seneca area farm by showing the train window as part of the image, Shay is simultaneously looking at human intervention in natural spaces and playing with abstraction in the lines of the fields and the concepts of space in an oculus created by duckweed in a pond under a vast sky.  In her photographic essay on trail blazes, Shay creates contemporary, larger than life portraits of individual blazes using her titles to add character to the blaze. In “Stare”, she uses the word to help the viewer connect a branch void as an eye to the blaze’s “nose” with the resulting steady stare of a somber animal assessing humanity for slapping paint on a tree and simultaneously bringing him into existence.  In “Explanation Requested”, she uses the title to question why the texture of the tree trunk where the blaze is located is completely different than the bark around it.  Over the course of the Blaze series, one is led to question the ways in which we set and track goals, the value of following prescribed paths and the need to leave a mark.