How a brain injury took an artistic life down a different path
By Kastle Waserman
At an early age, Gabrielle Shannon immersed herself in a world of creativity. When she was four, her parents divorced, and she spent time with her father exploring galleries and making art.
When he enrolled in painting classes at the Art Students League in New York, Shannon eagerly accompanied him. She knew art was her calling.
“I’d been doing art since I was about age two. I’d kept sketchbooks. Art was all I wanted to do. But it’s not really about wanting. It’s more like you’re compelled, almost addicted to creating,” she says.
She studied at Grove Arts in Berkeley, California, then returned to New York, where she worked on self-portraits and created playbills and posters for the theater district. She later married and had children. When the family tagged along on one of her husband’s business trips to Boulder, Colorado, they fell in love with the Front Range and decided to relocate.
However, Shannon didn’t get much time to enjoy their new city. A week after moving in, while putting away dishes, she fell off a ladder and hit her head on the corner of a wall, suffering a major traumatic brain injury (TBI), leaving her in what she describes as a zombie-like state.
“I didn’t walk or talk again for several years,” she recalls.
During her healing, Shannon said she slept a lot. After about two years, she started having lucid dreams of the ocean and the cosmos reaching for each other. “It was all swirling and swooshing. The colors were so vivid,” she describes.
Shannon knew she needed to paint what she was seeing. She found a studio and got to work, feeling her dreams were an epiphany. “I realized how deeply we’re all connected, the planet and the universe. I saw it in my mind’s eye. I had to get it out.”
The result was a series of stunning acrylic paintings: bright, vivid blues with a pearlescent shimmer that sweep across the canvas and feel like magnificent waves washing into the space.
Shannon says her health issues still leave her unable to drive or communicate clearly. Now living in Denver, she says she loves the nature that surrounds her, but she mostly enjoys it through her garden.
Believing that artists naturally possess a deep sensitivity and empathy for what’s happening around them, she expresses concerns about climate change and the current socio-political landscape.
“My brain injury gave me these profound realizations that have become the foundation of my art. It changed the way I create and why I create. I want to capture the feeling of interconnectedness. That’s why art is important—it gives us hope and beauty in challenging times.”
While she says she focuses a lot on water—currently what’s happening in the ponds and rivers in Colorado—she doesn’t paint directly what she sees, but rather the feeling she gets from it.
“I don’t do realistic work. It comes from the inside. Before I paint, I meditate for about an hour. Then I work, and whatever happens, happens. I just allow my intuitive memory and inner life to flow out.”
That “flow,” she says, is what keeps her going as she continues to paint, despite her limitations. “When you’re creating, you just get amazed by how things turn out. There might be a bunch of not-so-great stuff before you hit it. But that whole journey is completely worth it.”
Learn more on her website: gabrielleshannonstudio.com
