Prototype Issue
From the Earth: A Sit-Down With Shirley Cannon
By Polly Cole
(page 1 of 1)Her girlhood spent in West Virginia, Shirley Cannon was born to a coal miner father and lived with her family in one of the ensuant coal camps.
A creek choked with sulfur ran nearby and the children, being children, played in it. Coal dust settled on everything, including the people. The landscape was rugged, beautiful and poisonous. By the time she was 17, Cannon had enough. “I ran from there. I knew there was a bigger world.”
Cannon followed her older sister to Cleveland, Ohio where she worked as a secretary. “I could have gone to college. I had really good grades. I could have gotten a scholarship for West Virginia University, but nobody had ever gone in my family. We were coal-miners. I didn’t even know anyone that had gone to college and so my mother said just go to Cleveland and be a secretary. And so I did.”
Cannon spent the next 20 years in Cleveland. She typed away in a windowless office building, starting and stopping work to the sound of an industrial office bell. She married, had a son, and divorced. She subsequently met and married Robert Cannon, who at the time was a professor. Cannon calls him her “savior”. In her 40s, with Robert’s encouragement and support, Cannon started college, ultimately obtaining a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Arizona and a MFA in Painting and Drawing from Cal State Los Angeles.
It was in graduate school that Cannon first found the themes of her childhood infiltrating her work. “When I went to graduate school I knew how to make strong work, but I wanted to find out how to make strong work that was also beautiful to look at and wasn’t telling this big, obvious narrative. I had been doing a lot of figurative work so I wanted to do abstract work. I went to grad school so I could understand that and I realized that all the colors that I loved were colors that related to coal mining. I always used a lot of black. I always loved silver and rusted metal and those Indian yellow colors-the color of the sulfur creek.”
Her current work, now being shown at the Frank Pictures Gallery at Bergamont Station in Santa Monica, extrapolates on those themes. “The paintings are like landscapes, they’re almost like satellite photos or aerial photos of the earth but if you pull the earth back you really see what’s underneath-whether you see coal or whether you see something that’s liquid or maybe you see jade or you see all these semi-precious stones. So I started thinking about that but also how if I magnify the skin on my hand it looks like my paintings, the surface of my paintings. I’m really interested in that connection in addition to still using those colors. My work is really about the earth. It started out because of the coal.”
Cannon’s pieces are provocative, and although their subject matter comes from the ethereal nature of the artist’s own childhood memories, they beg the present day viewer to consider the earth, to ruminate on the things we pull from it: the coal, the oil we use to power our lives. And although they are purely abstract, Cannon’s works make me think of politics—the wars and violence we wage over access to nature’s gifts. I comment on this and the coal miner’s daughter replies, “I don’t have any political message. I’m just a witness. I bear witness to what’s going on in the world, in my world.”
Photos:
1: Shirley in front of her work “Bituminous Veins” 2: Detail, “Red Jade” 3: Detail, “Yellow Clay”
Discussion