Outdoor Gallery Exhibit: Justin Shull – Inside The Outside

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Justin Shull is best known as a painter of landscapes. He writes: “My landscape paintings are a celebration of color and the outdoors. They are also meditations on how we shape, interact with, and are shaped in return by our environments: these are paintings as much about the world we make as they are about the world that makes us.”

This captures the essence of the images of Inside The Outside.

In March 2025, Justin and Sarah Bearup-Neal, GAAC gallery manager, sat down for a conversation about Inside The Outside. Justin talks about his exploration of the natural world, of finding ways to depict traces of human activity in and with it, and the tools – both manual and digital – he uses to bring his visions to life. Read that conversation below.

There’s More: Learn more about Justin. Enjoy this Creativity Q+A interview with Justin.

Conversation with Justin

Sarah Bearup-Neal: Justin, you wrote on your website that your “landscape paintings are a celebration of color and the outdoors. They are also meditations on how we shape, interact with, and are shaped in return by our environments.” I thought that statement really captured the essence of Inside The Outside.

At first glance, one looks at the works in this series, and sees your stylized, graphic depictions of the natural world in your trademark palette of complex colors.  But in each one of these you’ve inserted a human or human artifact. They’re blurred or peeking through the vegetation, rarely the prominent point of focus. These human elements sneak up on the viewer, and some of them say boo. Talk about the thinking you went through as you envisioned this series of works.

Justin Shull: I write little notes for myself in the studio. About three years ago I wrote a note that said, “Figure out the figure.” I have been painting landscapes that are absent of people for five years prior to that. There’s a long tradition in the landscape genre of both the unpopulated landscape, and also the populated landscape. I kept on wondering why aren’t  any people in these paintings? It could be that painting people is a different skill set, and if you don’t paint people well, you don’t put them in your landscapes. There’s also the conceptual side of it, which is: Do you leave space for the viewer to populate that space; or, whether you give a more explicit indication of how people are moving through, occupying, presenting within that space. So, that’s where it started.

At the highest level, that’s how I approach a landscape painting where I’m trying to introduce a figurative element. For each specific piece, that figurative element becomes a conversation with the space. There’s symbolism and metaphor specific to each individual piece. Every piece that I make is ongoing, unfolding how people belong and exist, and what do they bring to the piece? It may seem obvious, but having a figure in the composition does allow one to connect psychologically, empathically with that space in a different way than just looking at an open space. You can picture yourself or someone else moving through it.

SB-N: You’ve been known as a landscape painter. For the last few years your work suggests you’re trying to get out of the landscape silo, and explore other themes and subjects. How hard is it, when one is known for one thing, to start moving in other directions?

JS: I think if you surveyed artists, a majority of them would say they don’t want to be confined to one specific thing that they make. I think the creative process in general is usually more expansive, and freewheeling, and ad hoc than the narrow range you might expect from a career artist. I also understand the push and pull of trying to develop down a deep path versus continually exploring a wide path.

I update my artist statements every year, and revisit a couple of core statements that are essential to what drives me to make visual art. One of the things that is buried in my statement on landscape painting is this notion of paintings that are meditations on how we are shaped by, interact with our environments. Paintings are as much about the world we make as they are about the world that makes us. That core interest applies to how I look at the outdoor, exterior space, the built environment, and our interaction with that. But it just as easily applies to the cultural landscape, the media landscape, the online world we’ve created, our interiors. When I look at my attempts to explore other subject matters, they ultimately come back to that interest to understand, fully, through my art, the world that we’re shaping and is shaping us.

SB-N: The works that are part of this series aren’t conventional paintings. They’re digital drawings. Talk about what digital drawing technology is. How do we understand it?

JS: There are a number of ways to create drawings using digital interfaces. I draw primarily on an iPad using a drawing app called Procreate. I adopted this as a drawing tool about six years ago because I wanted to embrace the repetivity with which I could iterate. I wanted to expand, then expand and refine my color vocabulary from piece-to-piece. I wanted to incorporate the color vocabulary, back and forth, from the physical media to the digital world. And really, what it is, is a hard surface that you can draw on with a stylus. You can do, and re-do, and build virtual layers you can move around, copy, paste, hide, unhide. It’s a way for me, first, to have a more fluid, iterative design practice; and secondly, to begin exploring the language of the digital world and how that can flow back into the ideas I’m looking at with landscape and media.

SB-N: How does digital drawing fit into your practice when you start thinking about picking up a paint brush to move paint around on a canvas?

JS: At this point, I almost exclusively use digital images I’ve created as source image, as the starting point for my paintings. From there I might follow that image anywhere from 25 percent to 80 percent. When you look at the finished painting, it might look very close to that digital drawing, or it might veer off in a different direction. Prior to adopting the iPad as a drawing tool, I’d utilize graphite sketches, colored pencil sketches, photographs and plein air studies for the landscapes, so that has been something of a shift.

The other thing that the iPad has enabled me to do more intentionally is to explore and incorporate the conventions of photograph into the paintings. The signifiers that photograph presents: the believability, the truthfulness, the things at a surface level we associate with photography that we might not associate with the invented landscape.

SB-N: Is the photograph a point of reference?

JS: For the past few years, I’ve almost exclusively been working from reference photographs that I’ve taken as the starting point. I trace shapes — from the photograph. I color sample — from the photograph — and then shift as needed. At some point, I delete that reference photograph and begin to invent, and move layers, completely repaint sections. The five images that are part of the Outdoor Gallery exhibition are birthed from photos; but there are good portions of those images that are completely invented as they still reference the shape and color and value logic of a photograph.

SB-N: I’d like to ask you about the drawing you did for Hay Door. In the other four pieces there are identifiable, human figures. In this one, there’s not. Talk about that.

JS: When I first proposed this series to you, I thought that it’d be interesting to start with five images that collectively capture aspects of Leelanau Peninsula, and this region; then, to explore, how people would occupy, relate to, move through those spaces. In the other four images, it’s explicitly an individual person kayaking, cycling, walking. This image, looking from the inside out, from the upper story hay loft door, was a photo I’d taken several years ago, and had been thinking about for several years — in terms of the juxtaposition of the agricultural space from 120 years ago, and then the evolving landscape outdoor with the road, the power lines, the condos. As I tried to envision how people would manifest in that outdoor space, my first inclination was that it’s a juxtaposition of speeds — the speed at which you would have to draw a hay cart with a horse and harvest hay with scythe versus racing down that road at 60 MPH in a car. Again, because it’s a digital drawing, I did seven-to-10 variations on that drawing, and none of them felt right. I realized that this other aspect of people moving through this space, this region, was accessibility through air travel, through jets. I’d already placed one of those jets with contrails in the sky, and I realized that that is both a very common and accessible way people get to this region; also now, more than several years ago, how people leave and come back for work. That was just as legitimate a reason for occupying the landscape as a person riding a bicycle through it. So, I left it at the jet. It’s more subtle. It’s part of a contemporary portrait of how we move through and occupy the outdoor spaces in this region today.