Self Healing

How sleep heals us, emotionally and physically
Sometimes both my work as an artist and a massage therapist come together to help the people I work with. Jodie was violently sexually assaulted and traumatised several years ago, and as part of her healing, she decided to come to me for ongoing massage work. I am the only male that Jodie will allow to touch her, and as she saw my other paintings develop, the relationships I have to the other Sleepers, Jodie asked if I'd paint her as a continuance of her healing process and a further opening of her trust. It was a beautiful and mutually beneficial process and I love the resulting painting. As Jodie rolls around in her sleep, her hands are constantly hugging, protecting/healing and reassuring herself in her sleep.

In the painting, Jodie is dreaming in the section of the Milky Way that was directly above her when she was born. For me it is akin to going back to her original pattern, the moment of birth and the flight of dreams, her self-healing hands appear and disappear as you walk around the canvas, her pattern changes and she seems to breathe. Four and a half years into the sleep series, and I feel that this painting is finding new sensory connections between deep human emotion and nebulous celestial form(lessness). I am so happy that Jodie wanted to work with me and even more so that both of my arts could be of such a benefit to her.

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Brisbane based artist, Billy Shannon’s passion as a painter is to explore our rather questionable reality. How much tangible information does one need in order to understand the emotional life of a painting? Transitory visual clues suggest a path that the viewer may take through the work. The next time the painting is seen, perhaps another path will reveal itself.

"My work as a painter has been formed and informed by my work as a scenic artist for the theatre and film industries from 1979 to 2007. Through that experience, I developed the discipline of working daily and rather than needing to seek inspiration, it just comes as I start work if it hasn’t been hounding me all the way to the studio.

"I work with acrylic paint on either stretched canvas or on hand crafted tondi made from MDF boards that I rout into circles and rout into specific frames to go with each work. I generally work in many layers of paint, using varnish as my medium as I am obsessed with the way light travels through all the optical and emotional layers, bounces off the substratum and travels back out to where we catch some of it’s mercurial existence and are struck by what stories it tells.

"I tend to work in 2 styles, either exceedingly brief where each moment of a stroke of paint tells an exact and multilayered story akin to sumi-e, but with colours. Otherwise I seem to go into a hundred or so layers, exploring the movement of light, colour and their interpretive capabilities."

Billy has participated in many exhibitions in Brisbane, Melbourne and Tasmania and has been involved in quite a few artist run spaces since 1990. A couple of highlights of Billy's life in the performing arts as a scenic artist was working on major theatre productions such as ‘Phantom of the Opera’ whilst working with Scenic Studios in Melbourne, and then being in charge of backdrops and murals for films such as ‘Nim’s Island’