Sentience

This work is in a tondo (round) format on a handcrafted board and frame that I made.

The Sentience series was inspired by observing the trees during a Vipassana meditation course. Looking up at the giant blue gums, their silent communication became quite palpable as well as the sense of the very long time their conversations must take, days rather than hours as their lives are much longer and slower than ours.

“Breath through the trees were as my own breath passing through my lungs’ alveoli, as well as the weighty energy of dhamma drawing in and out of the earth of my consciousness, reflected on a massive scale between earth and space through the sentient trees.”

There has been extensive research into the sentience in plant life, highlighted, for example, in books by Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, which indicates that the conversations continue both through the air, via scents, and underground via the mycelium of fungi. Accordingly, on the unseen verso of this work I’ve painted the unperceived, underground portion of this conversation

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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’