|
In Shannon Richardson's recent images, created in an eighteen-month sabbatical on the island of Martha's Vineyard, she trascends the boundaries between reality and memory with an element of the fantastic. Each painting becomes a template through which we can imagine our place in the world. Often referencing fairy tales as a way to describe her work, in a sense they are private fables. With a colorful palette and whimsical characters, their surface qualities are reminiscent of childlike stories, but what lies beneath the surface is a darker message and a warning from lessons learned in her youth. While using her art to both define and obliterate her past, she is able to take some of the severity of life and turn it into something tangible and beautiful, if not quite real. Through her art she has learned to accept and even relish her own eccentricities and imperfections, so much that we are made privy to the idea of the irregularity of life through the sometimes grotesque beauty in her figures.
|
|
Richardson earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting graduatung with honors from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR, studying her junior year in Rome, Italy. She has experienced an exceptional story-filled life, which enables her to produce such intense and honest works at an early age. She is collected throughout America and in Italy and Germany. |
|
Recent exhibiitons include "2005 Art Kudos International Competition" where Richardson was a finalist, juried by Giorgiana Cray Bart, Pennsylvania, 2005 Centerstage Benefit and Art Auction, Centerstage, Boston , MA, 2005 "Faces 2005" Juried International Show, the Blance Ames National Competition at the Ames Museum in North Easton, MA, earning the special "Blance Ames Award", 2005 Upstream People Gallery, Omaha, NE earning Special Recognition. Publications include Martha's Vineyard Gazette "Go Figure" August 24th, 2004, Portland Mercury "Backspace; the Art of Packman" July 9th, 2003, and "Kimset" CD cover John Larsen, Rainy Day Productions, Portland, OR, 2003. |
|
