The Artist

Shawna Miller is an interdisciplinary artist living and working near Aspen, CO. Her artistic interests range from figurative painting to site-specific installation and immersive virtual reality. Her most recent work is figurative oil painting focused on the bittersweet beauty and weight of motherhood. Shawna began oil painting in 2015 and has studied in the studio of Michelle Doll in Hoboken, NJ. She has a Master's Degree in International Political Economy and her artistic background includes a year of film school in Madrid, Spain, and work in advertising and marketing in Miami, FL. Now committed full-time to her fine art practice, she was a 2022 Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellow and had her first solo show at The Art Base in Basalt, CO in November 2022, as well as a two person show in Oslo, Norway in October 2023.

Shawna began painting the maternal subject to make sense of her own transition into motherhood. Amidst painting her present, she discovered a subconscious connection in the work to decades-old grief related to parental loss. Her most recent work has doubly fixated on the maternal subject by exploring the psychological effect of image duplication and iteration: as a process, as multiple products, and as abstracted mirror images akin to psychological Rorschach tests. 

"My paintings begin with my own photography. Most of my muses are friends or acquaintances, and I start by photographing them in their home environments. I do much of my compositional work in the photo-editing process in which I crop images or combine elements of different photos to define a narrative and mood. Recently, I’ve gone a step further with technology to break the composition into bright color fields that I paint onto a primed panel or linen as a fluid underpainting. I generally cover this underpainting completely with layers of oil paint, but sometimes I leave it visible as a window into the process, a graphic element, and a play between flatness and dimensionality. Some of my paintings I intentionally leave “unfinished” as an invitation to the viewer to fill in the gaps."

Her newest project, in development, departs from maternal subject matter but remains figurative with an immersive installation combining physical oil paintings and experiential Virtual Reality.