Raised on a family farm in Grafton in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Ashley Sullivan enjoyed taking trips to nearby Cleveland for baseball games or visits to the museum. She soon fell in love with the city skyline.
“Growing up far from a city you think of the romance and the drama of big city living,” she said.
Her passion for the bright lights of the big city shine through in her acrylic paintings that possess an abstract, linear quality in their depictions of Cleveland.
“I’ve just always been drawn to the architecture,” she said. “Even when I’m not painting a cityscape, it has a linear quality to it.”
Sullivan recently was commissioned through the Bonfoey Gallery to create an 8-by-5-foot painting for Bashein & Bashein law firm’s offices in Terminal Tower.
“It's nice to know the location of it, the importance that it's going to be in Terminal Tower,” she said. “Knowing where it will eventually live does help inform what I'm going to give more attention to as I paint.”
The painting was too large to work on in her home studio in Cleveland Heights, so she painted the skyline on a canvas leaning against the fireplace in her living room.
“It’s fun working on that scale,” she said. “It's great standing up. You can do more fluid motions [which] I think it absolutely translates into the painting showing that energy in life that I want to capture as part of a city.”
Her dream as a child was to be an artist, and she was encouraged by her mother to craft at an early age. Meanwhile, her uncle is Tom Batiuk, the award-winning cartoonist behind “Funky Winkerbean,” who showed her what it was like to be a professional artist.
Sullivan earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art education from Miami University. She then spent 10 years in Chicago with her husband before returning to Northeast Ohio in 2013.
Since then, Sullivan has documented the recent evolution of Cleveland’s skyline in her paintings.
“I got to see the Sherwin-Williams [building] go up. I've got plenty of paintings with the crane on top watching it slowly climb to its height,” she said. “Now watching all these new buildings on the riverfront. It's totally changing the paintings and it's changing the lighting right now at night.”
Sullivan wants to give Cleveland and other Ohio cities like Dayton and Columbus the same artistic love that bigger cities like Paris and New York City often get.
“I think people in Cleveland or in a little bit smaller-scale cities love seeing their home treated with the same well-deserved honor and glitz and drama,” she said. “So, it's nice getting to treat Cleveland as one of those bigger, grander cities.”
