15 Feb Telluride Arts: Free Artist Talk, 2/20!
Telluride Arts is currently featuring the work of Shannon Richardson, “A Parade of Parables,” through February 2020. The show runs through February 2020 at Telluride Arts HQ Gallery, 135 W Pacific. Open daily from 12-6pm or by appointment. Richardson’s talk is free and open to the general public. Come early for a meet-and-greet with the artist and refreshments.
Telluride Arts is hosting a free artist talk featuring regional artist Shannon Richardson. The event takes place Thursday, February 20, 2020, when the artist shares her imaginative approach to oil painting, including what inspires her and how she works.
Richardson paints daily in a light-filled studio loft above the Blue Sage Center for the Arts in downtown Paonia, CO, beginning each day with a sense of excitement and wonder, never knowing what will be revealed in the many canvases she works on simultaneously.
The artist begins each painting using oils, not knowing where the journey will take her, simply trusting her medium and her boundless imagination.
Each piece starts out life as an abstraction, with the focus on simple colors and marks, a phase that informs the finished piece much like Rorschach inkblot tests or the simple visions we see when looking at clouds. That process enables Richardson to develop a dialog within the physical act of painting. Next comes a flurry of questions and answers which develop organically into a narrative: a fable is realized.
Not wanting to share any of her deep, darks secrets, Richardson’s work does not explicitly represent her personal experiences: she buries those beneath layers of paint, creating a provocative dance between reality and fantasy. In the end, her paintings transcend the boundaries between memory and objective observation to reveal a dance between romance and reverie.
“I am able to take the gravity of life and turn that into something tangible, and beautiful, but not quite real. The truth becomes the fable, the remnants of dreaming.”
Shannon Richardson has created art her whole life, having grown up in a remote area of northern Washington, where making marks became an outlet that connected her to the natural and ethereal environment she called home. Fairytales greatly influenced a young Richardson, a fact that is on display in her narrative-driven, personal fables.
Richardson graduated with a BFA from the Pacific NW College of Art, studying abroad in Rome, Italy, during her junior year. She has worked as a full-time professional painter ever since.
Though her art is on display in homes and galleries throughout the nation and abroad, the artist maintains a humble lifestyle. When not painting, Richardson can be found working in her garden an urban farm girl in rural Colorado, who lives with a husband, five chickens, a pug named Yoda, and a cat named Nom Nom.
Telluride Arts HQ Gallery is a project of Telluride Arts. Telluride Arts promotes a culture of the arts within the Telluride Arts District, which contains a remarkable concentration of arts and cultural activity that engages artists from around the region and across the globe. For more information find the nonprofit online at www.telluridearts.org, or on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at Telluride Arts. 970.728.3930.
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