The soft watercolor choices in Shelly Porter’s paintings coalesce into keenly composed meditations on the fluctuating organic systems that assemble, sustain and deconstruct life. Porter shades her work with a focused iconic minimalism in the tradition of Georgia O’Keefe, but uses her simply framed subjects to grapple with complex and compound explorations on cellular and cosmic scales. The elegance at work in her strokes rarely seeks to tame the elements they address, but rather reins them in, emulating the compositional philosophy of Wassily Kandinsky by engaging the inner sounds of form and structure in the face of deceptive and startling abstraction. Her artwork boldly and clinically analyzes supernal themes with an emotionally charged palette and the subtlety of thematic pop art reduction.

Porter’s work has appeared consistently over the last decade in numerous exhibitions at the Art Center of Corpus Christi, as well as around her native state of Texas, and now reaches into the Northeast at the Agora Gallery.