My process is intuitive and guided by nature, memory, beauty, and soul-searching.
Shel Pink’s work emerges from a lifelong devotion to color, material, and creative inquiry. Raised in the suburbs of Detroit and having spent childhood summers on the lake, she developed an early sensitivity to nature, atmosphere, and the quiet emotional weight of visual experience. Art became her first language of reflection and calm. A formative art history course in high school shaped her academic path, leading her to study art history at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where she also worked in mixed media and photography.
After college, Pink moved to Los Angeles and began a career as a professional photgrapher, later launching a clothing line before founding SPARITUAL, a pioneering vegan beauty brand she led for twenty years. Her work in color, formulation, intention and reflection culminated in the publication of Slow Beauty in 2017. Across every chapter of her professional life, the principles of creativity, visual language, and self-care remained central. Painting, however, has always remained the original current beneath all that followed.
Pink’s return to painting formally began in 2019 with her first series, Her Abandonment, a body of abstract expressionist work rooted in lived experience and emotional excavation. Her current series, The Density of Delight, continues that inquiry through a richer chromatic and textural vocabulary. Pink works fluidly across oil, acrylic, pen, pencil, pastel, and charcoal, allowing material to guide form as much as intention. Color and texture function as emotional instruments in her practice, shaped by intuition, memory, and physical response rather than predetermined structure.
Pink’s abstraction is not theoretical but deeply personal. Gesture, density, and saturation carry the weight of interior narrative without submission to literal representation. Her large-scale canvases operate as layered emotional fields where stillness and motion coexist, and where perception is shaped through accumulation, tension, and release.
She divides her time between Philadelphia and Park City, Utah, where she maintains a studio. The scale, light, and clarity of the alpine landscape exert a quiet but persistent influence on her work, amplifying both palette and spatial rhythm.