Kathleen  Shanahan

Kathleen Shanahan was born in Galesburg, IL and lives in Wichita, KS. She received her BFA in 1969 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI and her MFA in 1976 from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. She taught at colleges in Arizona, Oregon, Missouri and Kansas. She taught at Wichita State University from 1983-1997. She also lectured in painting and drawing at University of Kansas from 2001-2002. She conducted research at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan from 1981-1982. She has had exhibits in Paris, Hong Kong, and Japan, as well as Kansas.

“My work has never fallen into a concise genre such as “landscape” or “still life”. Instead, my images are hybrids which incorporate elements of nature from the micro to the macro. I record nature for the intrinsic value of doing so, and for the analytical insights it yields; working “en plein air” is a meditation and communion with nature. Nature is the basis of all design and structure, and as such pertains to my own artistic processes. As a visiting scholar in Japan, I focused on gardens and the heightened role nature plays in religion and culture. Animals are more and more evident in my imagery as are action-oriented elements from sources such as the dance, theatre or sports, contrasting static with active. The sculptural properties of natural objects, as well as the dynamic properties, such as flux, and life cycle, are of interest to me.”

ARTIST STATEMENT:

An ongoing theme in my work is the reconciliation (or not) of opposites and dualities, as in the Buddhist idea of the coexistence of good and evil.

Each work begins as an escape toward an unknown destination. Sometimes the work starts with a constructed paper collage, where I have worked out design issues of scale, size, and placement of elements which play their role in the matrix. There I have manipulated the image. At other times, when paralysis strikes, I begin a work by committing to one visual element on the “canvas”, leaving me with a journey into uncharted territory.

I am an image maker, a figurative artist, though abstraction is often involved. I pursue the image, which begins as a visual puzzle of my own making. I am “out to solve” this puzzle, and I usually struggle with the myriad options, eventually resolving the puzzle with what I feel works.

At times the work before me becomes a three ring circus. I know there are many possible solutions to a visual puzzle, so that gives me the go ahead to try things. It is up to the viewer to complete the “meaning” of the work. It might speak to them on many levels. Maybe “the medium is the message”. I like mixed media for all the gritty relationships possible, as in satin versus gravel, chalky versus reflective. I like combining elements because of their associations, differences and similarities. They may have similar shapes but extremely different functions (bullhorn vs. ice cream
cone).

The journey for me in launching an image is, as they say, the reward. I like to hold the various elements in an image in suspension, so that the viewer may ponder their strange bedfellow connections.

Additionally, one of the pleasures for me in the pursuit of art making, is the sheer sensuousness of media manipulation (paint, pastel, plaster, whatever)