Going Up

IN APRIL, SHANNON Mello’s solo exhibition, What I Pick Up Along the Way, covered the walls at Colorado Springs’ Auric Gallery with artificial stones. Using woodworking tools, Mello shaped and sanded two hundred plywood panels, then coated them in layers of paint, wax, and resin to create abstract encaustic forms inspired by the kind of river-smoothed rocks a child might collect from the ground. For her next work, Mello looked up.

Mello is a featured visual artist at Green Box Arts Festival, July 4-19, 2026, in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. Her oil painting Weight of the Sky will be unveiled in a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and she will join José Antonio Arellano on July 5 for an ArtDesk Conversation about her work.

The painting, inspired by the light beneath looming storm clouds, will remain on view at Green Box’s Lake Street Display through October. “Colorado weather has a physical presence that I never experienced growing up in Michigan, storms here don’t just pass through, they take over,” Mello says in the festival program. “And when the light breaks at the horizon like that, right at the edge of something heavy, I have to paint it.”

Her upcoming exhibition at Santa Fe’s Divine West Gallery in September will feature what Colorado-based Mello calls “big sky” paintings, “kind of ethereal and atmospheric landscapes with an emphasis on the Southwest.” While these exhibitions seem to draw inspiration from opposite directions, Mello says she created pieces for both in the same time period and found surprising similarities. “I would take a break from the river rock paintings and work on some landscapes here and there when I was kind of losing my mind,” she says. “I was really zooming in and noticing geological patterns, and it’s pretty interesting to notice how many of those patterns repeat themselves on a larger scale in our landscapes.”

Noticing nature, Mello finds it impossible to ignore people’s dramatic impact on these patterns. “For a long time, I’d strive to get away from any human interaction or trace of human activity,” Mello says. “But you can make yourself crazy trying to find those places, and there comes a time where you kind of just have to make peace and say, ‘Okay, there’s a Coke can.’ There’s always going to be that interruption.”

In the spirit of “embracing the imperfections,” Mello will often purposefully incorporate traces of her own human activity in her attempts to re-create the natural world. “I’ll go back and use linseed oil to create almost a drip effect, or I will wipe away a portion of the oil paint to kind of expose the under layers, just to distort it,” Mello says. “In some of my paintings, I’ll have just a line going through it, and that’s kind of reminiscent of when I’m trying to capture the perfect photo of the sky, for instance, and there’s a telephone pole in the way or a power line. I like to throw those in there as a way to recognize that, yes, they exist. Yes, it’s okay to coexist, because things can still be recognized as having beauty either way.”