Portrait of the Artist

Angie Shanahan is a graduate of the Crawford College of Art & Design where she studied painting. Shortly after graduating she won the Taylor Bequest for Painting, also the Vision Award, selected by James White, former Director of the National Gallery of Ireland.

From 1985 after joining the newly formed Cork Artists Collective, she exhibited with them and in other selected group shows countrywide such as Oireachtas, Arnotts National Portrait Exhibition, the R.H.A. annual show, Iontas, etc.

At this time she also taught Art for the Adult Ed. Department in U.C.C. and worked on Commissions. In 1992 she was Artist in Residence in the Lavit Gallery after which she had a joint show with stained glass artist, Mary Mackey. This was followed on by Angie’s first solo show, culminating with three more solo shows by the end of the nineties.

A Commission from Collins Bookshop and Publisher to paint 52 scenes of Cork and County for the Collins Diary 1997 & 1998 led to an enjoyable jaunt around familiar and unfamiliar parts of her native County. Subsequently, the Office of Public Work, Dublin, commissioned Angie to paint 12 more scenes of Cork City for their Head Office. Also at that time the O.P.W. were compiling a gallery of Taoisigh or Heads of Government for Dail Eireann and commissioned her to paint the pastel portrait of Michael Collins.

Her paintings hang in public and private collections in Ireland, the UK and America. Angie is a member of the Artists Association of Ireland and is presently preparing work for her next solo show.

“My Forthcoming Work, influenced by everyday life and travel, focuses on a food theme. In a combination of the still life genre and the figurative, from restaurant and street cafe scenes to market life, I aim to create mood and a hint of dramatic tension in a narrative sense. But also by concentrating on the purity of the ‘still life’, through composition, simplification of form and solving tonal contrast, elevate it above the everyday”.