ABOUT SHANNON ABBEY

I've  always been this way. When I was a kid I made apple head dolls in miniature scenes and entered them in the Whitman County Fair. I won a plastic camera as a prize at my elementary school and was taking arty photos of our dog, my friends and my little sister. 

I grew up in the small college town of Pullman, Washington among the rolling hills of the Palouse country.

My family spent summer vacations camping, fishing, boating and swimming on the lakes and rivers of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. The love of the outdoors instilled in my sister, my brother and I by our  father, an avid outdoorsman, led to my passion for nature and animal life as the painting’s inspiration and subject matter.  

You think you are outdoorsy...the outdoorsy people of Idaho, Montana and Eastern Washington State, are a whole different breed. 

I was chosen as the 2022 Glacier Nat'l Park, Montana, Artist in Residence. Check out the video below. I was reminded how rugged these people are when hiking 7 miles with a 3500 elevation climb to get to the Sperry Chalet to begin the residency.

What I’m doing with acrylic paint is to create a window or grids by stretching one image across multiple panels or by taping an area or scraping back.

My influences are the masters throughout the history of painting and drawing. The Masters who let me see what went on, who show a little drawing, let the texture remain; Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Frank Duveneck, John Singer Sargent. 

Illustrator Barbara Bradley was department head and my drawing instructor (and eventually fellow faculty) at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I'm grateful to Barbara and her fellow illustration department faculty for nurturing a deep love and appreciation for the craft of drawing. 

My friends and I are those people you see at the museum, standing as close as security will let us to a paintings, trying to see that brush stroke up close. 

I'm an environmental woman artist inspired by the landscape and wildlife of Sonoma and Marin counties, particularly the wetlands along the Petaluma River and San Pablo Bay. My work is about this place, the natural world of the North Bay, combining representation with abstraction. 

After working as an illustrator since the early 1990s, I am now painting full time and my paintings are part of collections across the United States, the UK and New Zealand. 

I live and paint in Petaluma California with cartoonist husband, Pete McDonnell, our son Jacob and studio dog Mollie.

Primarily I paint in acrylic on wood panels in the studio, or on location around Sonoma and Marin Counties. 

I have an optimistic view of the regenerative power of nature when aware humans intercede.