Finding Beauty in the Mundane 

Professor Shelby Shadwell’s career as an artist and educator 

Photo by Darken Wolf

Far from the main portion of campus lies the Visual Arts facility, where art students of all stripes go to classes to work on their artistic abilities. From drawing, to digital art, to even making sculptures, the Visual Arts facility has it all. 

Professor Shelby Shadwell teaches various classes in the Visual Arts facility about drawing and expressing oneself as an artist, and has published various works of typically “mundane” things in his unique, charcoal style. 

“I’ve been at the University of Wyoming since 2007. So, I’m joining the 20-year club here coming up. And I teach all levels of drawing classes,” said Shadwell. “I am also teaching printmaking.” 

In addition to teaching classes, Shadwell is also the faculty sponsor for the Student Art League on UW campus, which is open to “all students all over campus that are interested in art.”  

He’s also involved with the Croquis, figure drawing of a live model, which he sponsors.  

“I coordinate the Croquis extracurricular figure drawing sessions that are free for students and community members here on campus,” Shadwell specified. 

Shadwell was an artist from a very young age, consistently working on his craft in all the way from kindergarten through high school. 

“Growing up in school, I was always drawing, at the same time, I was listening in class, of course, to my classwork, but I was always drawing in my notes,” Shadwell explained.  

“I was always pretty good at it. I thought, and everybody was like, wow, that’s cool. Can you make me something? And I was always like, no, I only wanted to make work for me, really. But that was early on,” said Shadwell.  

In college, Shadwell studied printmaking and drawing as a double-major in visual art and computer science.  

“Even though I wanted to do computer science, I didn’t have the aptitude as I did for art,” he explained. “I learned a lot from those classes and from that study, but I realized pretty early on it wasn’t right for me, and I decided to just really go into the art side of things.”  

Afterward, Shadwell went to graduate school for studio art before coming to teach at UW. 

One of the most recent art projects that Shadwell has worked on involves creating drawings of life-like trash bags in his unique style.  

He has created several full-size drawings of these trash bags, and even a drawing of the entrails of an elk who was hunted, which was inspired by an art piece he bought from a high school student. 

“It’s amazing when you look back 20 years, hindsight is 2020,” Shadwell said in discussion of his past with art. “Everything I was doing seemed to [make] sense after the fact.”  

In talking to students, Shadwell explains that “you don’t know exactly how things are going to turn out. And that’s very…that can lead to a lot of anxiety. But you look back, and you’ll be like, oh, well, that’s exactly the way things should have happened. It makes sense now.”  

Shadwell says thinking about his history with art helped him in creating his newer pieces. 

“I was looking at what I made and how it developed,” he explained, “and I had been doing, for instance, drawings of trash bags [back] in 2009, 2010, early on when I got here.”  

Now, “returning to them with oil paint and color—which is something totally new for me — just ended up making a lot of sense as a kind of a logical conclusion to the work I had been making.” 

Taking inspiration from a previous painting class, Shadwell’s style in his trash bag inspired art pieces experiments with using paint instead of charcoal, allowing the pieces to have more color and shine.  

During his time working with University of Wyoming students, he has found a lot of praise in some of the amazing work students have accomplished and the attitudes they held. 

“University of Wyoming students have always been extremely hardworking, extremely intelligent, and extremely coachable, with oftentimes the greatest attitudes of any students I’ve ever worked with,” Shadwell said. 

When it comes to his work, Shadwell explained that “art is extremely important, because it enriches our lives. A lot of times it’s invisible. There’s a great podcast about art and design called 99% Invisible. We don’t even think about it a lot of times, but everything that we look at here has been designed and that is where artists have come in and looked at things and said, ‘well, this is going to look good.’ And this is why. And this is why this thing should be designed this way. Now, we as users of all these things, whether it’s furniture, clothing, entertainment, new movies, we oftentimes take all of that work for granted because we don’t see it.” 

“For me, my work and being an artist, I feel like I am just starting in some ways,” Shadwell said. “I feel like I’ve kind of completed a body of work, and now I’m so excited to start a new one. And then I know that after I complete that one, I’m going to be excited to start a new one. So, there’s something great about this continual sort of renewal of these kinds of creative processes.  

Shadwell says that artists “go through these cycles where you’re excited; you’re creating something new. Then it might get a little tedious, as my ordeal with painting kind of got a little tedious, because they [take] so long. But then you start something new and you get excited again.” 

Shadwell is the faculty coordinator for the University of Wyoming for extracurricular open life drawing sessions, called Croquis.  

These sessions allow students and community members to draw nude models in a professional setting, and learn how to draw the human form.  

These sessions take place Sundays at 4 p.m., with upcoming dates on November 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd.  

The Croquis is located at the Visual Arts Building in Room 250. For more information or more dates this semester, contact Shelby Shadwell at sshadwel@uwyo.edu.