Shanon Playford

Shanon Playford lives and paints in her native Portland, Oregon. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and also attended the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Shanon positions her art within the Protean - Chameleon School of Painting, a fictional movement that encompasses her versatile style and the ways in which she adapts her methods to suit whichever theme she is currently exploring. Working in series, Playford first selects a concept and then determines the best way to express it. She says that “with every new series, there is usually a new challenge” in the form of a previously untouched subject, style or medium.

Her work might be best described as Poetic Realism. That is, she’s “not interested in painting just what’s before her, but something more elusive.” She achieves this in a seamless fusion of contemporary aesthetics with “close associations to the rich history of painting.” This richness is nourished through research and a wide range of influences. A self-professed “Vermeer geek,” her inspirations span art history, from the Dutch masters to the etchings of Goya to the para-realism of Lucian Freud. Her latest series, Oh My Gods, was a paean to Greek mythology, incorporating some contemporary “gods” among the more classical – Paul