Artist Statement

Born and raised in northeast Ohio, Sylvia Shanahan graduated from Kent State University with a degree in Graphic Design/Illustration. Ohio is also where she enjoyed a successful career in marketing, advertising and sales at several nationally known consumer products companies.

​Throughout her career though, she made time for her love of fine art--a love that started early in life through family outings to the Cleveland Museum of Art. “I would have started drawing earlier, but I was such an active child,” she jokes. “I never had the discipline to sit still. I could be found playing neighborhood baseball, climbing a tree or exploring the fields and ‘soon-to-be-built-on’ vacant lots in our area. My friends and I were always hunting for new places to discover ‘untouched’ nature.”

Shanahan believes that these childhood experiences evolved into an almost reverent love for landscape painting. Where she once scouted for natural vistas, she now explores new territory in color and technique. "My approach to painting has always been tinged with studies in metaphysics. Thin layers of paint overlap, merge, combine, morph…and develop into a work of art. It’s my vision of how ‘reality’ works—overlapping energies merge, combine, morph…and create what we see. And then it’s manipulated by our brain, personal histories, higher self or whatever you call your inner being."

"It’s been said that the space between thoughts connects us to the collective," she continues. "In my opinion, that’s what art should do—catch you off guard before a thought appears, reach deep into the bowels of the soul and link to a timeless universe."

Her approach to painting was noticed by Magical Blend Magazine in the mid-90s where her painting, “The Soul Remembers” was featured. Since then her work has won several local awards in Ohio and Florida and has also shown in Vermont and Georgia. Recently, her painting "Ophelia's Pond Revisited" was selected to be included in the Samsung Frame TV and is consistently one of the top ten paintings selected by subscribers.

In 2020-2021, Shanahan was so moved by the horrors of Covid 19 that she volunteered her talents to Faces Not Numbers, a group of artists that painted portraits of pandemic victims in an attempt to help soothe the pain of those they left behind. The portraits were gratis except for postage.

​When not painting, she writes about her sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, always true to her generation, life through a series of essays that can be found at boomerstoriesbysylvia.com. She's also an avid fan of history, art history, philosophy, and memoirs. As she explains, "It helps me find the common threads that make us human."