Statement: Colleen Tully graduated with a Bachelors in Fine Arts From (MSU) Metropolitan State University of Denver. Since then she has participated in group and solo exhibitions of her work. She also has a sketchbook in the traveling Brooklyn Sketchbook Library.
My artwork displays emotion and memory, engaging in the human experience through familiar subjects and ominous dream like environments or backgrounds, expressing not only a likeness of character, but a unique visual perspective into the narrative of the person being represented. The images of people and environments I create invoke similar and familiar emotions, feelings, memories, events, and dreams, which correspond within the imaginative fictional narrative that I deliver through these portraits. I use human subjects to unite this experience by creating a familiarity between the two. My current work is influenced by my love for gothic literature and poetry. Often, my work involves human representations with real emotion to initiate familiarity. These images designate stark reality to enrich the intensity of the portraits and the atmospheres they create; I employ selected materials to induce haunting and emotive images that provoke empathy. The origins of my subjects are attributed to what I see and find around me whether through my research of images, or through personal and shared experiences.
Bertolt Brecht, a playwright once described; visually we must create a language everyone can understand. Visually I demonstrate familiar commonality and shared experience among personal instances. The way these characters and atmospheres are portrayed communicates actual feeling and mood that interconnects with the narrative and character to reveal that commonality among emotions, feelings, dreams, familiar places, events and memories.