Shannon Rae Fincke (b. 1974, Pennsylvania, United States) is a Los Angeles-based artist who creates paintings on wood, clay, canvas and yupo paper. Her work explores ephemerality, interconnectivity, memories, emotions and psychology, and are influenced by motherhood and interpersonal and ancestral trauma. Shannon focuses on the alchemy of mixed water-based media and how it interacts with various substrates. She concentrates on control and intentionality versus the organic nature of the media. Her intimate and colorful figurative and landscape paintings range widely in scale and push the limits of materiality, surface, and abstraction. Shannon’s work is in private and public collections throughout the U.S., has been exhibited in solo and group shows at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. Shannon attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in high school, completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art at Washington & Jefferson College and Susquehanna University, both in Pennsylvania, and The Marchutz School of Fine Arts in France, and earned her master’s in painting and art education with high honors at New York University, where she was the recipient of a Gallatin Dean’s Graduate Scholarship and studied intensively with Arnold Mesches.

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 near 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 piece 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 frightened by what the art reveals in itself as I search to uncover the inner workings of my subjects as well as myself. Upon the birth of my third daughter coinciding with the pandemic, exactly a century after my grandfather was born during the Great Influenza, my focus went inward toward the interconnectivity within my immediate family as well as ancestral lineage. I am currently working on multiple series of figurative paintings based on identity, motherhood, familial relationships, and how we are intertwined with and influenced by our intergenerational family history and the profound events that shaped our predecessors. I follow the path of the work to determine how rendered it all will become—the images varying in their clarity or ambiguity, like the fragile moments in time, and constant and inevitable change, reflected in the fluctuating surface. 

Exhibitions:

In The Middle With You

Six Degrees of Abstraction

Five Fragments

The Long Conversation of the Unsaid

In The Dormant Splendor