Featured Artist Shannon Rios

Painter Shannon Rios interprets the landscape and all of her subjects in a distinctly personal creative style. Enjoy her portfolio, and visit her website for more.

 

 

I have been an artist my entire life, or at least since a high school teacher looked at my work when I was fifteen and said, simply, that I was one. That moment settled something in me that has never fully come undone. It didn’t make me fearless. It didn’t make the path straight. But it gave me a word for what I already was, and I have been living inside that word ever since.

 

 

For decades, painting was the thing I returned to, through marriages, through raising children, through every season a full life brings. I have a formal fine art background, an AA and a BA. But the truth is my real education has come from the four decades I have spent in front of a canvas, making mistakes, learning what color can carry, learning what it cannot. For a long time I painted the way people do when they are not yet sure they are allowed to take up space. Careful. Competent. Not quite mine.

 

 

Then came a false start that nearly stopped me entirely. I found myself on the phone with my daughter, in tears, telling her I didn’t think I could paint one more painting. She listened, and then said, “Mom, you have always painted beautiful landscapes. Just do that, and the rest will work itself out.” It was the simplest possible thing to say. It was exactly right.

 

 

I painted the desert. Her sister loves the desert too, and so I painted it for both of them; wide and quiet and honest. And then something happened. I started adding lines. Transparent white shapes. Geometric forms laid over the landscape like a second language spoken on top of the first. The painting stopped being a landscape and became something else: my voice, finally, in its true register. That is where everything shifted, and I have not looked back.

 

 

My work now lives at the intersection of cubism, impressionism, and realism. I use the word intersection deliberately, because it is architectural. I build a painting the way you would build something meant to stand, working from source material. Then I map light and shadow before I touch color. I apply the golden ratio to place the focal point. And then I build a color story, most often around complementary pairs. Blue and orange appear again and again in my work, not because I planned it, but because that tension is where feeling lives.

 

 

Color is not decoration in my paintings. It is the point. I want someone to walk past a canvas and feel something before they understand what they are looking at; that immediate, unguarded response that happens in the body before the mind catches up. The highest thing I can hear from someone standing in front of my work is not “That’s beautiful.” It is, “Come here, you have to see this.” That urgency. That pull. That is what I am painting toward.

 

 

My subjects are strength in its many forms: women who know exactly who they are, men on motorcycles moving through open space, tango dancers mid-turn, horses, bulls, dogs, landscapes that feel like they are breathing. I paint what commands attention, not because it is dramatic, but because it is alive.

 

 

I’m based in Southern Idaho, where I share a quiet and deliberately simple life with my husband, who is my biggest supporter, and our two dogs. I paint with music on. Silence makes me overwork a canvas and music keeps my hand loose. I read before I sleep. I travel when I can, and I carry everything I see back into the studio.

 

 

I came to this season of full focus later than some artists do, and have made peace with that. I’ve lived enough to know what I want to say. I have the technical foundation to say it. And I am only just getting started.

 

Shannon Rios invites you to follow on Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

 

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