Shannon Rae Fincke (b. 1974) is a LA-based artist who creates paintings on wood, clayboard, canvas and paper exploring ephemerality, interconnectivity, memories, emotions and psychology. Shannon’s work has been exhibited internationally and featured in print, film, and television. Most recently, she had a solo exhibition at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, and group exhibitions at Chautauqua Institute School of Art, Chautauqua, NY; The Stairwell Space, Bridgeport, CT; Torrance Art Museum TRYST Art Fair, Torrance, CA; and Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh, UK. She has been featured by I Like Your Work, Voyage LA Magazine, Artist/Mother Podcast, CanvasRebel, VVrkshop Art, Shoutout LA, Women United Art Magazine, and Art Mums United Podcast. She has also presented talks and served on panels for organizations such as Sustainable Arts Foundation, Polytechnic School, and Mount Saint Mary’s University. Shannon studied at The Marchutz School of Art in France and earned her bachelor’s in Studio Art from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania and her master’s in Painting and Art Education from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Shannon is also an art educator, administrator, curator, and gallerist. In 2023 she founded The Middle Room, a contemporary female-focused gallery concentrating on mid-career artists and on creating connections and conversation. She is also the owner and director of Institute for Visual Arts, a community-based art school for children, teens, and adults, which she founded in 2011. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she resides with her three daughters and maintains an active studio practice.

The act of making is a dialogue between myself and the materials to create a bond between the image, color and spatial relationships, media, surface, and scale—be it intimate or encompassing. I have always found it meaningful to focus on the materiality of paint and surfaces in my exploration of emotional and psychological intensity. I create organic shifts between subject and environment—dissolving figurative elements into varying degrees of abstraction to emphasize the ephemerality of memory, time, and our conceptions of who we are, what has happened, and what might happen next within the fluctuating surfaces. I work on a painting until the imagery contrasts and connects with evolving, uncertain environments and surface qualities—until the composition feels alive in its tension, unity and meaning. I make art about what fascinates me, and I can be intrigued and surprised by what the art reveals in itself as I search to uncover the inner workings of my subjects as well as myself.

Exhibitions:

The Dinner Party

The Middle Becomes Eclectic

In The Dormant Splendor

The Long Conversation of the Unsaid

Six Degrees of Abstraction

Five Fragments

In The Middle With You