Shannon West shares her process and thoughts in creating her art. Shannon’s studio can be found at 324 Cleveland Ave. NW on the second floor of Second April Art Galerie.
Endearment
My paintings emerge as a result of interplay among various conditions of abstraction and figuration. Through jumps, shifts, slides, pauses, and bursts, I assemble fragments of images from various origins. I weave advertising, art history, graphic design and cultural symbols into flowing clusters that have a deliberate play among them. Nature and botanical gardens are some of the main influences for all of the work that I create, because plant life and flowers have many cycles that they must go through to survive.
I am interested in articulating new spaces, creating passages, revealing new relationships and opening possibilities for the formation of a series. Every element converses with the space that lies between it and other forms. The balance of my personal goals to be an active artist as well as a supportive military wife is often expressed on the canvas. Every layer represents a decision, challenge, or a tender circumstance. Whether difficult or simple, they are metaphors for my life. The layers that appear on the canvas are metaphors for the shedding of myself on the canvas.
The paintings that I create look very decorative, with patterns that form through the repetition of line. The materials I use range from acrylic and enamel to spray paint and stencils to create a complex original design. Every painted situation yields another. In each of my paintings there is a yearning for communication, to have something, to hold something, and to reach out to someone.
An image is sometimes worth a thousand words and nothing can underline that more than a vivid design that practically brings the content to life. Graphic design is something that you see everywhere, on t-shirts, books, as well as many other things. Design has become a way of marketing, a way to reach out to an audience. Some of the motifs I create appear with a cold, graphic, authoritative visual vocabulary. Patterns of flowers, decorative swirls, and leaf-like shapes filled with brightly colored elements react to a string of popular Brazilian fabric and Arabic rug motifs in other paintings. Other resources I use in my paintings are clip art, and design books. Designs from Chinese, Asian, Islamic, Arabic, and the Iraqi cultures are a big inspiration to me. Being able to take an image or design from another culture and bring it to life by abstracting it in my own manner creates something that not only communicates with me, but with the audience.
My husband is in the military. His journeys around the world are where some of my international influences come in. Inevitably, some of the items that he brings home have influenced me to think about the lives that others outside of the US live. The Afghani culture and the Iraqi culture have very beautiful fabric designs and artwork. Their designs have found a way into my paintings, even though they may not be evident.
A wide, almost limitless range of effects can be achieved with the colors I use. I think about the emotional impact of color-how color determines the mood of a picture, how color can denote joyousness, gayety, and laughter, or how it can be stark, ominous, and foreboding. Every color presents itself as character trying to reach out and compete with others that lie on the same surface. The shapes have an identity, a feeling that is being let go of, so that I can move on to the next canvas. With every new character, I shed a layer of myself, a representation of letting go, trying to see through the troubles that I am going through. Sometimes it is like garbled speech on a canvas trying to communicate with the observer. There are many imperfections that bother me on each of the canvases. I have learned to work with these imperfections, to allow things to happen and embrace them.
Some of the artists who influence me are Beatrice Milhazes, Ryan McGinness, and Philip Taaffe. Beatrice Milhazes paints images onto plastic sheets and uses a glue transfer to adhere an image onto the canvas. The motifs that she uses are very decorative floral patterns from different cultures. Milhazes embraces the mistakes that happen within each transfer in her paintings. I admire Milhazes’ ability to embrace her mistakes and react to them accordingly.
Ryan McGinness uses the process of silk-screening in his paintings. He chooses one design, logo, or calligraphic mark and repeats that image in various sizes over and over on the canvas to create depth. McGinness starts out using common shapes or symbols, such as a tree, or a clover to create his images, with an organic form around the shape. From there McGinness begins incorporating calligraphic marks and weaving the two ideas into his own image. The repetition of line being layered gives the illusion of depth. In his work, McGinness combines his own iconography, language, and historical and contemporary symbolism. The result is a very complex image of line with graphic marks.
Philip Taaffe is yet another artist that I look to for inspiration. Taaffe takes images and/or ideas from other cultures and layers them in a manner to create a patterned painting. Taaffe uses the paint and the silk screening process to create his paintings. He references iconography and hieroglyphics to make his images, which he then abstracts to create new images. Taaffe jumps from painting to painting with a different idea or theme in mind. Taaffe states that he has been Òreworking images taken from nineteenth and twentieth century books on natural history, and different cultures. He is always looking for something so representative of its type that it almost becomes an abstract element—a distillation or encapsulation of all its varieties. It is a characteristic which does not exist in nature, but only through our observation of nature—or more to the point, through my exposure to historical materials concerning nature.Ó The outcome is beautiful, abstracted patterned paintings created from history.
There is a connection between Taaffe’s influences and mine. We are both referencing different cultures and transferring them to canvas. Both Taaffe and I use very decorative designs in our work. There are interrelationships and connections and rhythmic bounces in his paintings. The rhythm is very important, the paintings have to have a kinesthetic reason to exist, they have to move. That is how I compose the paintings. Every part has to be activated, has to have energy. Both Taaffe and I use very decorative designs in our work.
There are many reasons why I make the formal choices that I do when creating a body of work. The main reason is trying to incorporate design elements from other cultures into something that will speak for itself and stand alone in the art market. The strong decorative motifs that I create are something that has a unique quality that continually grows stronger with each piece that I create.
Thank you Shannon for your thoughtful post.
We will keep you and your husband in our thoughts and prayers while he is deployed.
Thanks Shannon. The insight into your work is fascinating. I especially loved learning about your influences… those artists are new to me and quite interesting. Keep on.
Nice art work, I cant wait to see what else you come up with soon. Thanks Ashley