Provision
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic and gold metallic on Masonite panel
Prints of this piece are available at my online print shop:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/shawne/
(Original not yet priced)
Traditional and Supernaturalist Paintings in Acrylic (mostly) and Colorful Hand-Painted Charger Plates
Provision
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic and gold metallic on Masonite panel
Prints of this piece are available at my online print shop:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/shawne/
(Original not yet priced)
Lemons on Blue
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
$100 unframed (no frame needed)
Violet Eventide at Wells
7 in. x 14 in., acrylic on canvas
$200 unframed
Haze Over Harpswell
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic on masonite panel
$200 framed
Summertime in Exeter
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on cradled wood panel
$150 unframed (no frame necessary)
Goodness
8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on cradled wood panel
$180 unframed
Poppies!
5 in. x 7 in., Soft pastel on sanded paper
$150 matted and framed
Happy Heliopsis
5 in. x 7 in., Soft pastel on sanded paper
$150 matted and framed
French Breakfast Radishes
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic on canvas
$190 unframed
Mount Cardigan Alpenglow
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic on canvas
$190 unframed
Prints of this piece are available at my online print shop:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/shawne/
A deliverance icon. Imagine being Jesus in Luke 8, who, being confronted by a demoniac (who knew exactly who He was), finds Himself being bargained with by the demonic powers. They know what He is capable of, and began pleading for more lenient terms of their dismissal. It's apparent they desperately want to be embodied and be go inhabit the herd of pigs on the hillside. He give them the left hand of (dis)fellowship, and allows them to do so, but the pigs aren't having it. In our animal-exalting society, isn't a breath of fresh air to see Jesus reckoning the worth of a man as being of much more value than a herd of pigs. In this icon, you'll see the chaos pigs represented as three groups of six as they disappear from the rocky cliff where the poor oppressed man found shards with which to cut himself. Away they fall, into the waters of Galilee, funneling down over the edge as through the neck of an hourglass, because they know their time is short.
Rainy Laconia Morning
8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
$200 unframed (no frame necessary)
Bay View Summer ~ SOLD! Somebody liked this!
11 in. x 14 in., acrylic on cradled Masonite
$240 unframed (no frame necessary)
Photo reference courtesy Carolyn Steenrod
Roses on Royal Albert
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
$100 unframed ~ SOLD! Somebody Liked This!
Photo reference courtesy Dennis Pfeil @dennispfeil.art
Emmaus Heart
16 in. x 20 in., acrylic on canvas
Prints of this piece are available at my online print shop:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/shawne/
(Original not yet priced; unframed)
You might be familiar with the oft-seen "sacred heart of Jesus" image, on fire, wounded, topped with a cross and surrounded by thorns, popularized chiefly in the painting by artist Pompeo Batoni (1708 -1787). Batoni's painting is based on a supposed apparition of Jesus to Catholic nun Margaret Mary Alacoque in France in 1673.
This is not that. Quite the opposite.
While the flaming "sacred heart" imagery is supposed to be a depiction of the love that Jesus has for mankind, frankly, I'm a Biblicist. And the only reference explicitly describing a burning heart in the scriptures is in Luke 24:32. And the heart doesn't belong to Jesus. It belongs to His disciples.
His disciples, who have just experienced the presence of the living, resurrected Jesus, Himself.
This painting uses iconography elements and is based on a stunning incident from Luke 24:13-35.
On Easter evening, Jesus, after his resurrection, catches up with two disciples walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus where they live. They don't recognize Him, and He doesn't immediately reveal Himself. He asks what they are talking about, and they tell Him about "all the things that have happened as of late" in Jerusalem over the Passover weekend. He plays dumb and asks, "What things?" They are incredulous and remark that He has to be the only person who hasn't heard all the news. They express their great grief over the murder of their Rabbi by crucifixion, their dashed hopes that He was the promised Messiah, and their perplexity that they've heard rumors of His resurrection... and they don't know what to think. Jesus chides them that they don't know the scriptures well enough, because if they did, they'd understand that the Messiah was foretold to suffer in like manner. For the rest of the walk to Emmaus, He explains the scriptures to them to put together the puzzle pieces they aren't seeing. Upon arriving at their house, they invite Him in, and as He breaks the bread for supper with them, suddenly, they recognize Him!
And then He just... vanishes.
This piece is an illumination of their wild exclamation to each other, right before they put their sandals back on and ran back to Jerusalem to tell the others:
"Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us on the road, while He opened to us the scriptures?"
The hand in the icon is Christ's. Is the heart yours?
For those who may be unfamiliar with Greek icons, allow me to decode what you're looking at. The IX XC inscription is a Christogram: the iconographical shorthand for Jesus Christ. The Greek inscription Εμμαύς Καρδιά is Emmaus Heart. The circular nimbus around the hand holding the heart with the cruciform elements around the outside edge denotes Christ and the Greek letters contained there Ὁ Ὤ Ν means "He who is."
Protest Art
8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on cradled wood
$170 unframed (no frame necessary)
Ubiquitous in gardens across the UK and Europe, tasty gooseberries of many varieties, used in jams, pies and sauces, or eaten out of hand, are found everywhere. Everywhere over there.
Let me explain. When I was a little girl, I started life picking these wonderful sweet-tart, vaguely grape-like berries every summer from the sprawling, thickety, green bushes, careful not to catch my fat little fingers on the thorns. My parents had them on their property when they bought their house in the 1950s. I was born in 1969 and relished the cool pop of gooseberries on my tongue every July. I remember my dad, an avid gardener, wanting to add to the ones we had, and browsing the Miller Seed Catalog from Canandaigua, NY, discovering other varieties, purply-red ones, golden ones, and other kinds of green ones like these. He mailed in his order and that was that. A week later, he received a call from the nursery at Miller's. "I'm sorry, Mr. Morrill. I'm afraid we can't ship you the gooseberry bushes you ordered." The nurseryman explained that in the early 1900s, a federal ban was issued on all Ribes family fruiting shrubs, because they could carry a blister that harmed white pines. Mainly aimed at black and red currant varieties, the family also included, unfortunately, gooseberries. They pulled them up wherever they could find them, and burned them, nearly eradicating them. That's why most Americans now have never heard of them. And until the day of the phone call from Miller's, dad had never heard of the ban. Apparently, the bushes we owned had been missed during the gooseberry and currant holocaust, and dad had no idea. The plethora of big white pines crowding the driveway by the woods never seemed to care about our little bushes way over on the other side.
He dug them up and took them when we moved to a different house in second grade. The bushes were looking pretty ragged, weathered and old by the time I left home and got married, probably getting punky with old age. The pines there never once even had the sniffles.
The rest of the story goes like this: In 1966, about 55 years after decimating Ribes in this country, the US lifted the federal ban and now you can grow them in the US. Yay! However, a handful of states still have them on the banned list or tightly regulated. My state is one of them.
I'm mad about it, and this is my protest art. I can walk down the street and catch the whiff of a skunky cloud of smoldering marijuana that muddles the brain and stunts the spirit and no one does a thing about it. But I never smell gooseberries on anyone's breath. If I did, I'd have to call the Agricultural Schutzstaffel with the shovels and blowtorches.
Winter at Portland Head Light ~ SOLD! (Somebody liked this!)
12 in. x 24 in., acrylic on canvas
$300 unframed
I love the coast in winter, at least to paint from. The mood, landscape and colors are often more interesting than summertime, which can often appear bleached and muted by the full summer sun. We were on our little annual winter trip to Portland this year and it had been a while since we pulled in to Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth. This lighthouse is one of the most photographed places in America. Even Edward Hopper gave it his treatment. It's hard to get a unique view of this lovely place, but the view from the cliff walk, with the ragged, rocky cliff wall, the dead grasses, and the fickle winter sky was enough for me. I hope you like it.
The Work of Your Fingers
(An Illumination of Psalm 8)
7 in. x 15 in., acrylic and gold metallic on canvas
Prints of this piece are available at my online print shop:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/shawne/
$250 unframed (no frame necessary)
While reading in the Psalms, the imagery of the eighth psalm filled my mind with idea of the fingerprint of God. I thought of the whorled pattern of galaxies and neurons, of suns and moons tracing their predictable paths, of planetary movement, our own system a labyrinth of ellipses. The whirlpool of air currents and waters, the striated rows of both waves and plant cells and the helix of plant growth and DNA. All of these bear the characteristics of the divine fingerprint; the poetry rebounds from metaphor and surprises us with the nearly-literal. This offends our sensibilities. There's a certain amount of safety in keeping God cloaked in symbolism and simile. We can play about with metaphysical wordplay, impress each other with our profound-sounding platitudes. And while it is true that God is mysterious and beyond our ability to fathom, He also puts Himself right. in. your. face. He writes His name with a child's fat-fisted scrawl; He pushes His signatory crayon hard into the pulp of His creation, watching you to see if you will be willing to notice the deep trenches of his patterned marks, or else turning aside to be preoccupied with the randomness of the errant wax flakes. In all these things, everything lives and moves and has its being, from divine creatures and stars and angels to people and animals and plants and microbes and cells and elements. And in the center, a single red blood cell, signifying the One who took on flesh and poured Himself out for humanity and creation.
Also, I dig groovy fonts.
Tuckerman Ravine Trail ~ SOLD! (Somebody liked this!)
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
$150 unframed (no frame necessary)
A four-plus mile trail to the Mount Washington summit, the Tuckerman Ravine Trail isn't quite as steep as one might think, thanks to several switchbacks on the way up. Some trail reviews, however, say things like, "wandering off the trail could have devastating results." So, while there's definitely a way up the bowl-like ravine carved into the side of the Mount Washington rock pile, there's one SAFE way up. In this painting, the clouds at the top aren't sky clouds. It's mist surrounding the area above the tree line. Welcome to New Hampshire.
Photo reference courtesy Mick Haupt @mickhaupt102085
Acadia
20 in. x 20 in., acrylic on canvas
$650 framed
This is a fairly large piece. It needed to be.
Unless I'm in the White Mountains, Maine always feels so much more wild than New Hampshire. Yet, because I've spent so much time there, it's so much like home. In fact, geologically, it's much closer to New Hampshire than Vermont, which is made of very different stuff. That's obvious just by crossing to the Shire-esque west bank of the Connecticut River. No, Maine is largely made of great slabs and piles of igneous granite just like New Hampshire, along with pine needles and sand banks and brushy barrens and swamp maples and oak groves and clover-covered fields. But the interaction of granite cliffs and salt water is what makes Maine so different from New Hampshire. We've ruined our meager 18 miles of coastline with ugly traffic tangles, shops and arcades and sidewalks with parking meters that would steal one of your kidneys for payment if they could (I won't apologize for excoriating whatever leaders of state and coastal towns for overdeveloping it into abject ugliness... fight me, shameful scoundrels). But Maine has managed to keep bit and bridle firmly attached to the would-be ravishers of much of its coastal natural spaces, and for that I'm thankful.
I hope you like this piece of coastal Maine, with its tenacious, weathered conifer trees, its wildly changing skies and unrelenting tides. A dear friend camped near here with her family and graciously allowed me to paint from what she captured while she was in Acadia National Park.
Photo reference courtesy Kate Goodin
Sunny Side Up
8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on cradled panel
$200 unframed
Last year I painted bacon. At the time, it didn't occur to me to move on to the obvious eggy follow-up. When I paint, one thing does not automatically lead to another. But of course, now I'm thinking about toast... anyway. This wonderful fried egg was a fun and interesting challenge to paint, from the crispy golden edges to the scattered salt and pepper. There's not actually a lot of pure, straight-from-the-tube white in this piece; the subtle pale colors swirling in the cooked egg white are surprisingly convincing and I was able to reserve the white for the few highlights.
Moonrise
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic on canvas
$160 unframed
The moon rising in the inky darkness over water. As it peeks over the horizon, it casts a complementary glow up into the cloud cover and across the surface of the lake. It faintly illuminates the grasses and earth on the near embankment between the trees. There's something cozy in a nocturnal landscape, and I aimed for looser, expressionistic brushwork here in an effort to capture the fleeting moments of cresting moon and the rapidly changing turbulence of the clouds. Photo reference Jill Hatfield.
Pocket Lindt
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
$100 unframed (no frame necessary)
The reference for this piece is courtesy @dennispfeil.art who manages Instagram's #foodpaintchallenge, which I've made use of frequently for fun and interesting subjects for painting. Originally, the photo was a grouping of four of these wonderful chocolate bonbons but I chose two of the four to focus on and paint. The crispy, dented foil-lined cellophane wraps were fun to render in acrylic, and who doesn't love a Lindt Chocolate? I hope you like it!
This Little Light of Mine
8 in. x 10 in., acrylic on canvas
Not yet priced; unframed
Yet another painting of a shiny object. This is from a photo my son Dave took of a glass-bottomed oil lamp happily glowing on the wooden dining table at his home. The bright flame and reflections in the chimney against the warm darkness feels like security, safety and hope. Isn't that what we are called to be, the darkness be damned against the light that is in us, but does not originate with us? This little light announces to the the darkness who we are, and Who we serve. That little light tells it, "You cannot pass." And it knows it can't. It knows.
Red Velvet on Gold
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic and metallic paint on gallery-wrapped canvas
$100 unframed (no frame needed)
The holiday season is the perfect time to make use of metallic acrylic paints, and about halfway through this little poinsettia study I decided to cut some bright gold metallic into the background around the bright, velvety red bracts. Did you know that poinsettias don't actually have true petals? Those red things that look like leaves are actually, well... leaves. The flowers are actually those tiny little yellow doodads clustered in the centers. I hope you like the festive gold against the soft, layered reds. This piece could brighten a mantel, a bookcase or a wall where the light can play on the metallic gold during the Christmas season.
Jingle All the Way
6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
$100 unframed (no frame needed)
I've been on a shiny kick lately, appropriate for the Christmas season. It's a great exercise in creative self-mastery to hold back from punching in the lightest lights (or the whitest whites) until very late in the painting process so that you intentionally work from dark to light. I find it keeps me from getting ahead of myself to hold the dark and mid-tones within a controlled range until it's time to go in with the lightest of shades, and, of course, titanium white, when there's cause to use it. The curious little shapes of the reflected colors and lights in the surface of the polished sleigh bells are a scream to paint. They're just SO WEIRD, and it forces me to have to trust my eyes and simply paint the shapes I see in the colors they are. It's like a little miracle when they begin to add up to a convincing illusion of real reflective surfaces. I hope you like it.
Wet Sand and Crimson ~ SOLD! (Somebody liked this!)
8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on traditional-depth canvas
$140 unframed
Back in 2020, we decided to take our annual Christmas shopping trip up to South Portland earlier than usual to avoid the crowds because of the pandemic. So we went in early October, when Moody's Motel and Cottages hadn't yet closed for the season, and it was glorious. Dustin booked us in one of his very quiet rooms at a time when not many people were going places like Wells, Maine. The best thing, however, is that the beach is literally across the street. A short stroll across Webhannet Drive will take you to the ramp at the corner of the sea wall. There we were, enjoying Crescent Beach... and in October, nearly by ourselves. One of the two evenings we were there, the sunset on the beach was an otherworldly kind of beautiful, the tide was going out, and the wet beach was like a mirror. The firmament was on fire for fifteen minutes, burning up the whole world with yellow and orange and pink and crimson... and then it was gone. If you can believe it, this painting is an attempt to capture it, not exaggerate it.