I paint landscapes from observation, responding to the juxtapositions between nature and human built structures. The urgency of painting with oils outdoors necessitates a quick response between my vantage point and the painting’s surface, moving between representation and abstraction. Depicting paired down simplified dwellings, land, and water, I emphasize color relationships and spatial tensions seeking a visual narrative that is as insistent as the subject.
Lou Schellenberg
Recent Press, Lancaster PA, April 2024 :
MIKE ANDRELCZYK
BIO
Lou Schellenberg is a landscape painter of architecture and habitat in Pennsylvania, Maine and Nova Scotia. Her work is in numerous public and private collections in the US and Canada. Commissions include a recent painting for LL Bean in Maine.
Raised in New York and New England, Lou studied art at The Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and University at Albany NY. After receiving an MFA she taught art for 20 years and is Emerita Professor of Art at Elizabethtown College, PA.
Schellenberg is on the Board of Directors of Mount Gretna School of Art , an intensive observational landscape painting school on Pennsylvania.
When not painting Lou volunteers as a Habitat Steward in Lancaster County and as a Riparian Ranger for the Chesapeake Bay Alliance.
Her work is currently represented by Lancaster Galleries, PA and
The Willard Gallery, South Portland, Maine.
Full CV below
Gallery Space Article Excerpt
The Burg, Harrisburg PA , April 2014
Scott Campbell
Practitioners of the visual arts see the world around them differently than most people. It is not something acquired through an undergraduate degree, although such instruction may well hone that perceptive ability.
Painter Lou Schellenberg recognized the gift in herself at an early age. “Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated with buildings, how they are arranged within a space, how they block out parts of the landscape or sky,” she says, “and the contrast between what is nature and what is not that is represented in the buildings and land upon which they are placed.”
All of that is obvious when one looks at Schellenberg’s paintings. They are, essentially, landscapes. Elements within each one are recognizable and the colors do not stray far from reality. But the subject matter acts as a grid on which her concepts of space, color and form rest.