[9] For a short time in the late 1950s, she was a student of the painter Betty Holliday and, in the early 1960s, learned printmaking in the Long Island studio of Ruth Leaf.
[4] By the mid-1960s, Shirley Gorelick had worked in various media, including painting in oils and acrylics, intaglio printmaking, drawing in silverpoint, and sculpting in terracotta, stone, and wood.
[3] In 1959, her focus turned to expressively rendered female nudes, often seated or reclining, which were painted with loose, fluid brushstrokes that allowed her to liken the body to a landscape.
[4] Responding to her first solo exhibition, at the Angeleski Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1961, Stuart Preston commented on the "impressive warmth" of Gorelick's nudes while noting that "form is abstracted and played around with such lavish complexity as almost to defeat its own ends as figure depiction.
"[10] By 1965, she was reimagining canonical works of art, including Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Giorgione's Concert Champêtre by recasting the figures as more lifelike studio models.
[3] Between 1967 and 1969, Gorelick created a series on the theme of the Three Graces but represented ordinary, mature, and finally African-American women in place of the traditional, idealized European nudes.
"[13] Gorelick's Willy, Billy Joe, and Leroy (1973), a portrayal of three African-American men standing in the artist's studio with The Family II (1973) as a backdrop,[9] was also praised by art critics.
[4] Gorelick's next series, Three Sisters (1974–77), depicts a trio of sibling models who range from seventeen to twenty-one years of age, robed and nude, in a leaf-patterned garden.
[16] Described by one reviewer as a group of "flabby teenagers who are ... the products of leisurely, suburban living,"[17] Gorelick's unidealized figures were meant to reveal psychological states, with varying degrees of pain, questioning, anger, and confusion communicated by nuances of position, gesture, or facial expression.
"[19] In 1976, Gorelick painted a nine-foot portrait of Frida Kahlo for The Sister Chapel, a feminist collaboration by thirteen artists which celebrated female role models.
[9] The earlier series depicts Lee Benson (1922-2012), an academic and historian who wrote The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (published in 1961),[20] and his wife Eugenia, known as Gunny.