Shooting For The Moon, TC Artist Lands At ArtPrize

A unique painting recreating one of the most-iconic images in mankind’s history will launch a local artist into one of the top art competitions in the country.

Traverse City artist Justin Shull is headed to Grand Rapids this weekend to display his “Moonshot” painting at the prestigious ArtPrize international art competition. It begins Sept. 18 and continues through Oct. 3.

“It’s really common for artists to come across images and collect images,” Shull says. “Some of the most deeply resonant are photographs from the moon landing…it was only more recently in the current body of work where I started to look back at those images and recognize the symbolic power of what those represent for humanity’s efforts of exploration, adventure, research and pushing boundaries.”

Shull describes Moonshot as his “most ambitious painting to date.” It’s a six-foot square painting done on four separate panels that represent a “down-rezzed” image of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous self-portrait while standing on the moon during the Apollo 11 space mission in 1969.

The pixelated painting is composed of 331,776 tiny, individually painted dots that took more than 300 hours to complete over almost four months early last year. The top corners feature references to the digital age and Shull’s gaming background, including a health meter in the top right corner.

Shull submitted the piece for last year’s ArtPrize, but it wasn’t accepted. He refined his application to better describe the intricacies and complexity of the painting process, and it was selected for this year’s event. It will be displayed at The B.O.B., a massive four-story dining and entertainment complex in downtown Grand Rapids that’s among ArtPrize’s premium display venues.

The piece was commissioned for $25,000 by Vancouver art collector Sean Bender who’s purchased other works from Shull. Moonshot will be shipped out west after the competition to join Bender’s collection.

Shull says his art is focused in two areas – working with natural landscapes and what he describes as “mediascapes” to explore modern technology’s impact on today’s world.

“The mediascapes have a shared thread in the sense that I’m looking at how do we shape the world, and how does it shape us,” Shull says. “Except instead of looking outdoors at the landscape, I’m training my lens on the media environment that more and more defines our daily experience – the digital spaces that we occupy and communicate in, and the screens that we stare into and interact with.”

Shull grew up in New Hampshire and did his undergraduate work at Dartmouth. He originally focused on pre-med, but soon realized “that visual art was my calling – my vocation” and switched his major to studio art. He pursued a graduate degree in fine arts at Rutgers University.

“I really wanted to be a professor,” Shull says, and later taught at Southern Methodist University and Texas Christian University in Texas. He went back and forth between his artwork and a growing career in his other passion as a video game developer that he did for the next 10 years.

After living and working in several cities, Shull moved to the Traverse City area in 2017. He had extended family who previously lived in Charlevoix and recommended it as a good location to continue his career and raise his two children.

He set up his art studio in a suite in the Tru-Fit complex on Woodmere Ave. almost five years ago, and says it’s been an ideal location to grow his business.

“As an artist, having a place where you can hang and display your work that gives it justice is so important,” Shull says. “Having a space with big white walls where I can hang a six-foot by six-foot painting is very important to help me before I bring it out into the world at a place like ArtPrize.”

Shull has artwork in private collections across the country and even internationally, and his work is on display at art galleries in Michigan and the East Coast. He estimates that about 30 percent of his work is for commissioned paintings, and the rest is focused on works he wants to create.

Going forward, Shull is working with some local curators on exhibition proposals for his new mediascape series, while also continuing his interests as a game developer.

“These larger paintings really haven’t been out in public much,” he says. “I’ve sold several of them, but I’ve not had an exhibition of them in a public space where people can look at how they relate to each other.”

“If I could have an exhibition of these large mediascapes, that would be a real milestone for me,” he says. “That would be very rewarding, and I would love to bring them to a bigger audience.”

Shull is excited to display at ArtPrize, but also looks forward to talking with patrons and visitors to share more information about this work.

“To stand in front of your work for three weeks and talk to thousands of people about the paining you made, that will be a great experience – one that artists don’t get normally get the opportunity to do,” Shull says. “When you have to speak to thousands of people about your painting, I think you narrow in on a more effective way of communicating about it verbally.”

ArtPrize was founded in 2009, and annually brings almost 1 million visitors to downtown Grand Rapids. It awards more than $400,000 in prize money to artists through juried and popular voting, and distributes over $200,000 in grants to eligible artists.