Shannon Astolfi is an abstract painter living in New England. She received a BFA from the University of Massachusetts and an MLIS from Simmons College. She has shown work and participated in creative projects across North America.
I paint habitats, real and imagined, formed organically and spontaneously on paper. My recent work captures the line of the horizon, the shape of the land, and the color of the atmosphere in my home environment, New England.
For several years I have been exploring the idea of personal identification with a geographical environment, the way we adopt a landscape or atmosphere as part of our identity, and the concept of belonging as the basis for healthy relationship to the world. My abstract habitats are meant to generate the sensation of welcome immersion in a familiar space. I use the relationships between visible layers in all my paintings, drawings, and collages as evidence of the process of their creation. Each work on its own and the collection of habitats as a whole represent a map back to a moment of expansive stillness within the landscape and a record of the space and strata experienced in that moment.