Kris Shanks is a plein air landscape painter and woodblock printmaker working in the wine country of Sonoma County in Northern California.

About my paintings

Painting landscapes plein air, directly from the subject, is a way for me to connect with the natural world. The experience of being immersed in one’s subject, taking in the sounds and smells of a landscape even as I’m trying to capture the visual essence of the view, is a dynamic and energizing experience. Painting outside forces me to work quickly to capture fleeting colors and shadow patterns as the light changes.  My work seeks to capture a particular moment in time, and as such they are artifacts of my process of bearing witness to the landscape. I’m interested in the dynamic tension between creating an illusion of  space while maintaining the viewer’s awareness of a flat, paint-covered surface.  I hope that when someone looks at my paintings they have a sense of the place I painted, but also that they maintain an awareness that somebody made this object, that you see the marks of the brush, and the interplay of line, color and shape on a surface.

About my prints

All my prints are hand-printed using a traditional Japenese printing tool, the baren. The multicolor prints are either printed from several blocks, one for each color, or as reduction prints. In a reduction print, rather than having several blocks, the print is created using only a single block, and is carved in succession between colors. There is no going back in a reduction print.

Education

MA, Biology, San Francisco State University, 1994

BFA, Painting and Printmaking, California College Arts and Crafts, 1989