Biography
Cheryl Shurtleff is known for her lush charcoal surfaces and was a master in creating moving and visual tensions in her drawings. She investigated the process of drawing in the course of her artistic production. The genius of her work lay in its intense simplicity and beautifully rendered images, while exhibiting a disturbing and mysterious quality through the heavily worked pencil images on paper. She focused on the heads of animals drawing attention to their facial characteristics as “emblems of their sensitivity.” She was quoted as saying.” For me, the animals personify beauty and power; the essences I strive for in all of my work.”
She received her BA at Boise State College (1973), her BFA and MA in Art Education, Boise State University (1978), and MA in Contemporary Art History from the University of Oregon (1988). She worked and exhibited as a professional artist since the 1970’s and taught for 36 years at Boise State University.
In her 2014 solo exhibition, “Encounters”, her graphic works explored the representation of animals and animal consciousness. In Congress of Curious Peoples, 2011, her work was cited in an edition of the NY Times Magazine, Time Out, as one of the “Five Things to See at the Congress of Curious Peoples” exhibit. In 2014-15, she was awarded an Idaho Individual Visual Artist Fellowship by the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, she held the centerpiece of an exhibit of Idaho art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Cheryl Schurtleff’s art is held in Boise and Portland art museums and in many public and private collections.