Shelly Madruga is a contemporary artist. She creates large scale paintings using fast, flowing marks and layers of grounded tone upon tone, exploring gestural movement to create assertive abstract artwork. She lives and works in her hometown of San Diego, California. Studying color theory throughout her twenty year career of graphic design in an internationally recognized advertising agency, Shelly has taken this knowledge of color into her painting practice. Her painting style has evolved from abstract portraits to abstract landscapes and most currently, her intuitive abstract gestural pieces. Raised as the daughter of a builder, construction tools feel at home in her hand. Today she paints mainly using a carpenter's trowel as her technique to lay down paint. Shelly focuses on experimenting with texture and transparent layering of color to evoke a feeling. She seeks inspiration in human emotion and the desire to relate that feeling onto the canvas. Oftentimes, the feeling can read as both calm and urgent at the same time. A dichotomy of feelings. A layering of emotion.