about:

Shawn Sloan is an artist based in Berkeley, California. His work sits at the intersection of light and structure- bands, angles and fields of color that press against each other without resolving. The paintings ask the eye to hold two states at once: what is visible, and what the visible implies.

Sloan holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The California College of the Arts and a BFA from The California College of Arts and Crafts. His training is formal, but the informing sensibility comes equally from landscape- from years of moving through terrain where reading negative space and trusting what you cannot yet see, is the difference that matters.

In 2015 he completed a 30 day Wilderness First Responder and Outdoor Educator course with the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming’s Absaroka Wilderness-28 days in a remote landscape learning wilderness medicine and how to lead groups safely through environments with no margin for error. That quality of attention- still, precise, aware of the field around the object- is present in every painting.

When not in the studio, Shawn climbs in Yosemite Valley, snowboards, and moves through remote sections of the Sierra Nevada. The work is inspired by those travels- not their scenery, but their physics: light at altitude, the weight of open space, the knowledge that the most important thing in a landscape is often the thing you are about to enter.