Shannon Crees

 

 

Australian artist and fashion designer Shannon Crees never fails to amaze us with her new and graphically exhilarating art work.  Her innovative graphics work can be easily mistaken for graffiti, but it is in fact a new art form in itself.  Amongst her many achievements the impressionable artist featured her work in the Banksy Cans Festival in 2008.  Her burst into the public eye hasn’t come without it’s challenges.  She had to launch herself as this alternative designer who was misconceived at first, but she eventually pushed through and established the target audience for her work.

 

 The only way to stereotype her art is to title it ‘open street art’ but it has much more potential to influence the work of future artists, modernising the entire art industry.  We have to ask ourselves as art critics, the public, artists, or whomever, why it has taken so long for the idea of graffiti as a conceptual, modernised art focus to be accepted into our galleries.

 

Museum curators and critics have been cynical about her work during her recent years in industry, saying that she lacks the prestige and beauty that art museums are reputable for.  Crees has produced some beautiful work using a fusion of colours to translate emotion and surrounding imagery with shapes that frame the image, highlighting it in a less obvious manner than a border.

 

 

‘Passion Fruit’ is an infusion of bright pastel colours and has an overlapped, unnatural feel to it.  The painting exploits the body of a naked female and the face has a shadowed outline which defines it against the background, keeping a consistent palette of colour throughout.