Maureen Shields

Born in San Gabriel, CA. Lives and works in San Francisco, California.

The intent of my work is twofold. First, I hope to initially attract and seduce the viewer with beautiful beguiling surfaces and candy colors. The tone of the work is often at first glance innocent and playful by the use of images of children from old books dating from the 1920s to the 1990s, images from arcade games, as well as the use of bright and sparkling color. Second, upon further examination, as situations unfold and we have time to read the ambiguities, the work that could initially be construed as cloying and saccharine, instead inspire a sense of danger or dread. Rather than being welcoming and nostalgic, the work suggests a repulsion and unpleasantness beneath the alluring veneer. I hope to engage the questioning of the viewers own nostalgia.Potentially, my work is a reminder that beneath both the surfaces of the painting and nostalgia lies experiences and images far more complicated than what they initially appear. More complicated because they are masked by conceptions of how we think these things should be rather than how they have been experienced. In my work, I seek to reintroduce the strangeness and complexity I associate with childhood. I...

BFA from California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 2000.MFA from New York University, New York, NY, 2004.