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Bio
Billie Shannon is a Kentucky oil painter whose work finds its subject matter in the world immediately around her. She paints the children and grandchildren she has photographed over the years, the animals on her farm, the flowers in her garden. She paints the tender objects of everyday life that most people pass without a second glance.
Shannon came to painting through a creative life built across multiple disciplines. With a background in business, and years of hands-on experience in graphic design and marketing through her work building brands and publications, she brought to the canvas a trained eye for composition, color, and the way images carry emotion before a single word is spoken. Her oil painting is self-taught, shaped entirely by vision, persistence, and the stories she needed to tell.
She lives and works in Whitley County, Kentucky, where the rhythms of rural life, changing seasons feed her imagination and artist’s soul. Shannon works surrounded by the very things she paints. Grandchildren running through the yard. Animals wait at the fence. The garden changes with every season. It’s a life she has chosen deliberately and loves deeply.
Her debut collection, Language of Small Wonders, marks the formal introduction of Billie Shannon as a fine art oil painter. It is a body of work that began in family photographs and grew into something larger. It’s a sustained meditation on the fleeting beauty of ordinary life and the people and places she loves within it.
Education
Master's Degree in Educational Leadership
Union College, Barbourville, KY (now UnionCommonwealth University)
Dual Bachelor's Degrees in Business Administration and Management
Union College, Barbourville, KY (now UnionCommonwealth University)
Associate Degree in Technology
Somerset Community College, London, KY
Artist Statement
My work is figurative and still life oil paintings grounded in the emotional backdrop of ordinary life. I paint people, animals, and the quiet corners of the world we cherish as they slip into memories. A child mid-wish. A garden flower at its peak. A teacup on a worn table, Christmas morning. A farm animal caught in an unguarded moment.
I’m drawn to the things most people walk past. The warmth. The whimsy. The tenderness of everyday life. I paint them because I believe they deserve to be seen, held and remembered. I paint them because beauty doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes its silent, and small and gone before you think to look.
Each painting begins with a real moment. It might be a photograph, a memory, or a story someone shared. I rework it until the emotion feels universal. I build color in rich, jewel-toned layers, over a warm underpainting, using thin glazes and finishing with loose brushwork in the background so that everyday becomes something worth appreciating. Emotional truth matters more to me than likeness.