1970...Commenced Art Diploma.
1971...After completing 1st year of Diploma,obtained Cadetship in Printing and Kindred Industries,training in mainly Graphic Art for Advertising,remaining in this field of work until 1975.
1975...Commenced Training as a Draftsman,manual work on a Drawing board,with a limited number of Artworks along the way.
1990's.Computer Aided Drafting replaced the Manual work and with it a certain loss of individuality.
2007+...with the encouragement of a couple of good folk a return to Art, up until now............................................................................................................................................................
Seeing what the camera doesn't see!
Some artists live in a rarefied vacuum of their own quest for expressing their unique vision, their singular version of art and art-making as it relates to their personal experiences, which is to be driven by the contemporary need to stamp one's subjective stance on sociopolitical and cultural matters by triggering a psychoemotive response in the viewing audience.
Occasionally an artist of Shane Sier's calibre arises who sees himself as a type of visual zeitgeist journalist, an objective documenter of his times, but not in a blatant photopictorial manner, rather by capturing the moving vectors of the day in a kind of shorthand jazz-jive beat, a type of freeform optical play, like a graphically notated pantomime which plays out as an artistic response to the commonplace, to the everyday, in a choreography of graphic marks and a tango of tonrealized in a style of abstracted cartoonery.
"I try to release on the sheet an interpretation of everyday endeavours..the mood, emotion, contemporary activities, and the shapes often fleetingly formed and repeated ÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ generally what the camera doesn't see, what the computer can't interpret," he says matter-of-factly.
With a professional background in graphic art, the printing industry, and computer drafting, Shane relishes leaving machine-made virtual reality behind in favour of his "back to art" actions which are let loose by the pencil and pen as images flow through them from his eye, into his hand and onto the paper.
"It is the artful impact of sights, movements and surrounding sounds that are new; these to me bring shapes to my mind - fresh experiences not previously seen nor heard of people in the flight of creative energy that fuel my imagination with images.
"The practising of skateboarders endeavouring to improve on their skilful repertoire by pushing to extend their boundaries creates a visual melody in my mind, a hook which I expand on and then release onto paper or canvas as a drama of lines, masses, contours and shifting depths." Shane explains.
His desire to translate onto the picture plane his observations regarding the impact of technology on one's private life - the quick impersonal response-times of phone texting, the sharp impersonal reactions on social internet sites, and the driving need to "get it out, say it and not care about whether it is understood" - appears in his paintings and drawings as "incomplete brushstrokes, abbreviated symbols and disjointed spaces and forms", thus conveying a deep sense of organised chaos to the viewer, but in a logical, rhythmic and coherent pictorial context.
Shane Sier is not a mainstream artist. He is an outsider whose poetic eye lifts the realistic gauze from assumed normal social interactions, thus uncovering an abstracted beauty and harmony in the ordinary that the busy human mind is conditioned to overlook.
.................................................................................................................................................................................... Michael Berry.
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