“Shannon was one of a number of artists who studied with Jeffrey Smart
in Europe after the war, taking lessons from Fernard Léger (at the Academie
Montmartre) between 1949 and 1952”.
“Shannon recalls that Leger was impressed by his drawing ability, (‘Formidable’,
was his comment), asking where he had been trained. Leger was, however, even
more impressed by the fact that students should have come all the way from
Australia, a country too distant to be contemplated.
His paintings of suburbia and of the bayside cities are visions, not of inhumanity
and alienation, but of redemption. The city is seen as a sanctuary from loneliness,
and from the dangers of an environment often inimical to man.
Shannon’s treatment of urban life stems from his upbringing on a farm,
a ‘culturally deprived situation’. His appreciation of what urban
life had to offer is in sharp contrast with those other artists who have
treated the urban environment seriously.
They have almost all approached it in political terms, as a means of
precipitating social change. For the city-scapes of urban Australia
were not subjects in themselves
but simply a means of drawing attention to social inequality by forcing our
awareness of the squalid living conditions of the urban poor. Even
the mildly surreal images
of Jeffrey Smart are concerned with the alienation of man within the urban
environment rather than with the city-scape for its own sake”.
REFERENCE
Mary Eagle and John Jones, A Story of Australian Painting, Pan Macmillan Australia
Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1994, page 230
Graeme Sturgeon, Michael Shannon, Painting and the Poetry of Daily Life, Craftsman
House, Roseville, 1990, pages 14, 15, 25
REPRESENTED
National Gallery of VictoriaArt Gallery of New South WalesArt Gallery of South
AustraliaArt Gallery of Western AustraliaTasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
