I love illustration.  I have long been captivated by its power to educate me, arrest me, provoke me, delight me, fascinate me, inspire me, take me out of myself and show me things I wouldn't have otherwise ever seen. 

I love posters.  I am passionate about them.  Posters, and their miniature equivalents, stickers, are the ultimate examples of subversive art.  Masquerading as merely cheap advertising or propaganda, they can present mind-bending conceptual art or exquisite technical prowess in the space of a scrap of paper or a GIF.  They can be mass-produced and mass-distributed so readily, so unobtrusively, that they become part of the landscape.  They sit quietly in established society, representing something else entirely.  They are silent agents of change (sometimes), satire (often) or just interest; small salvation from the mundane.  I love their immediacy; their ability to demand your focus on the strength of an image, and then work on your mind; their power to serve symbols directly to the subconscious, for whatever purpose -- sometimes there is no message on the side of the plate, but the appetite has been whet; the channel opened.

I love illustrators.  N.C. Wyeth, Leyendecker, Pyle, Mucha, Nagel, Struzan, Pushead, Ruscha, Frazetta, Vallejo, Rockwell, Willard, White, Black, Palombi, Utagawa, Hokusai, Vargas, Elvgren, the Constructivists, the propagandists, and now, the entire crop of Juxtapoz/Hi Fructose/Gawker-driven talents who are making the most of the Digital Age.   It stirs me to see so many gifted artists taking advantage of the truth that a large percentage of the world's population now carry a full gallery in their pocket.  There has never been a better time to make images, or to love them. 

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BIO:  I grew up in remote Army outposts all over the world, during the height of the Cold War; Saudi Arabia, Japan, Washington, D.C., Oklahoma and Hawaii were a few of the many disparate places my parents and I called home.  My father, Col. Walter J. (Bo) Shelton, first disarmed, then contracted, nuclear weapons and other munitions for the U.S. government.  His career had a profound impact on my aesthetic sensibility; my first great artistic loves were military insignia and symbols, Soviet propaganda posters, and the early-1980's Eastern Bloc aesthetic that inspired bands such as Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode.  Later, this paired well with a taste for skateboard graphics and Golden Age Illustration.  While I've been drawing since I could hold a pencil, I started painting in oils at fifteen, and soon had my work exhibited in several nationally-renowned galleries and museums, including a student exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.  (Incidentally, my first job was decorating special-occasion cakes for the Joint Chiefs of Staff while my father was assigned to The Pentagon.)

Not long after I started drawing, I discovered I could sing and act; I've been doing both since I was six.  My painting career was interrupted by a ten-year tour of duty in rock and roll, fronting my hard rock band, The Mimsies.  We enjoyed a stellar run, making a splash in Hollywood, garnering superlative press in rags from the L.A. Weekly to the New York Times, attracting celebrity fans and major-label attention, touring North America both on our own and with the Vans Warped Tour, where we played with artists like The Damned, AFI, Rancid and NOFX.  At the peak of our momentum, I found myself exhausted by long-standing chronic illnesses.  With my then nineteen-year-old guitar player and boyfriend, I let myself be kidnapped off our tour from New York City, spirited away to Cincinnati by our management team, and eventually hopped a Greyhound to Memphis, Tennessee.  

 

What followed was a decade of unraveling the mysteries of my unreliable health, searching for answers as to how to make a life for myself in a world that didn't seem to jive with my needs, and still be satisfied as a Creative.  With lots of love and support from my parents, partners, friends and employers, I found the answers I was searching for through trial and error (and a couple of helpful doctors).  In my experimentation, I earned a degree in Music Business, learned how to retouch in my Mom's photo studio, helped start a law firm, became a certified personal trainer and pinup model, and got married twice.  Hesitant steps back into performing led me into a burlesque career with the world famous Hubba Hubba Revue.  I had not picked up a pencil in years, when Hubba Hubba founder MC Kingfish called me to have a shot at taking over illustrating the well-known monthly Hubba posters.  By that time, my pencil was made by Wacom, and the moment I picked up that digital device, my life made sense. 

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Through radical lifestyle changes, the power of positive thinking, and the support of a litany of creative and talented people I'm honored to know, I'm now producing the work I always knew I had the capacity to produce.  Art and music form the foundation of my daily life, and that, to me, is living the dream.