I am an abstract artist. There was a time when I did figurative work.  But primarily I do work trying to recreate a sense of the earth. I feel very connected to the earth. I think it’s inevitable whenever you are raised in an area where people earn their living two miles underground and where the hills sometimes catch on fire.

I live now near Los Angeles, California, but my work is still about looking at the earth, very often as if you’re looking at my work through a satellite photo. I want the work to look like the earth from a great distance and then somehow these fingers separated out and you get to see what’s underneath. I want them to look dry on the outside and wet on the inside. Sometimes things eke out by certain techniques that I use.

I think primarily the paintings are also metaphors for the people that I don’t put in the work. The people are there, because if you look at this magnified skin, sometimes it looks just like photos, satellite photos of Mars.

So that is pretty much what it is about.

Shirley Cannon.  Visual Artist.  Born: West Virginia.  Lives: Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. B.A., Univ. of Arizona; M.F.A., California State Univ.  Ms. Cannon’s work has been exhibited nationally in New York, California and Arizona, and most recently internationally in Italy.

My name is Shirley Cannon, and I am an artist from the United States. I grew up in the coal-mining country of West Virginia, and I am basically a painter who uses a lot of mixed media and does installation art. My work is about the earth. I am interested in what’s above the earth and what’s under the earth, and I think it’s all related back to the years living in a coal-mining camp. My father was a coal miner, and the colors that I grew up with were the colors of the coal, the black of the coal, the intense Indian yellow of the sulphur creek that was toxic water that was pumped out by the coalmines. I love the colors of the men’s dinner buckets, that silvery gray color. I love the rust that surrounds all the area of the coal-mining towns and I also love the color of the men’s gray uniforms. I didn’t really realize this until I had been making art for a while, but these colors kept showing up and once I realized that, my whole focus is about mining. 

Shirley Cannon