Monica Shulman

Monica Shulman is a New York-based artist whose brand of gestural abstraction is a form of story-telling. Rooted in the traditions of abstract expressionism, Monica’s world is best described as colorful and rhythmic, and her paintings reflect an evolving universe where communication is less concrete.

Primarily self-taught, Monica creates sculptural surfaces through her heavily layered impasto technique, and her paintings exhibit a compulsive energy and invite you to meditate on your own history. She engages the medium itself, specifically oil paint and oil pastel, as a participant in her work. Monica’s relationship with mark-making is textural, incorporating physical gestures into a lyrical and painterly stream of consciousness.

Emerging from the fluidity of her visual language, her process-oriented work explores overlapping themes of the human condition, identity, elements of nature, and self-reflection. Monica is a first-generation American strongly tied to both her Cuban and Argentinian roots. She’s a former lawyer who left her career over 15 years ago to focus on her art practice full-time, and she lives and works in the lower Hudson Valley with her husband and their children.


Artist Statement

For me, color is less about representation and more about emotional translation. It acts as a carrier of memory, atmosphere, tension, and rhythm. My work often begins with fragments of lived experience: shifting seasons, twilight light along the Hudson River, travel, landscape, or the lingering emotional imprint of a moment that resists clear narrative.

Through layered surfaces of oil, oil stick, and pastel, I use color intuitively, allowing it to guide structure as much as feeling. Saturated tones collide with muted passages; transparency sits against density. I’m interested in the way color can hold contradictions at once: softness and disruption, nostalgia and immediacy, presence and disappearance.

While the paintings remain abstract, they are deeply connected to observation, memory, and the natural world. Each work becomes a reconstruction rather than a depiction; an attempt to preserve the sensation of something felt before it fully disappears.


https://www.monicashulman.com/