Celluloid

Celluloid is an abstract expressionist painting by Shawn McNulty built around color, texture, and the unpredictable interaction of painted forms. The soft pink ground creates a surprisingly calm backdrop for a dense arrangement of vivid greens, blues, oranges, reds, turquoise, black, and magenta. Scraped passages, layered paint, rough edges, and exposed areas give the surface a physical quality that rewards looking at it up close.

I titled the painting Celluloid because something about the image reminded me of old-school film. Maybe it was the combination of color, texture, and the slightly fragmented quality of the forms. It has the feeling of something that could have come from an old strip of film—only one that has been through a few decades of questionable storage.

The painting was created during the same period as Viceroy, Trope, and Skylark, and the four works share a similar visual language. I was interested in building compositions from blocks and fragments of color while allowing the painting process itself to disrupt and reshape those forms. Some areas feel almost architectural, while others break apart into loose gestures and scraped layers.

As with much of my abstract work, Celluloid isn’t intended to depict a particular place or object. Instead, it leaves room for the viewer to make their own connections. The more you look, the more the shapes can begin to suggest things—buildings, figures, machinery, landscapes, or perhaps frames from some strange old movie.

The result is a colorful, energetic abstract painting with plenty of texture and visual movement, but with enough of that pale pink ground showing through to keep everything from becoming completely unruly. Celluloid is very much about the balance between control and accident that keeps abstract painting interesting.