Birgitt Shannon has a lasting love of cooking, gardening, travelling and spending time with her husband and friends. More than that though, she is driven by her creative soul. Born in Geelong, Australia, she spent eleven years at the Geelong Fine Arts School – run by two artists.
She attended classes two nights a week during these eleven years, where she studied everything from art history to etching to life drawing. “We also had excursions to galleries in Melbourne and other towns twice a year and regular weekend workshops where we did things like sculpting and creating masks to wear at the end of year exhibition. I ended up attending for so long because the teachers kept coming up with such interesting things to create and I loved being with people who loved art as much as I did.”
Having drawn and painted since she was a young girl her dream was to be an artist. She exhibited a lot while she was at art school. However, as so often happens, family life and work began encroaching on her creative time until she stopped, for a long, dry thirteen years. She really believes that those thirteen years were the biggest mistake she made in her artistic career and is now totally focused on her artwork. “All of the years I wasn’t painting, there was an empty hole inside me and I couldn’t explain why. Now that I am painting full time I know it was the creative part of me that was unhappy.
See more about Birgitt here.
