David Patric Shannon (1920-1999)

Born in Oklahoma, he served in the Navy during World War II. At Stanford University, he was active in theater and choral groups. After earning a master’s degree in painting at UC-Berkeley, he taught art and theater at colleges in California and Texas and directed art museums in Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Shannon died at age 78 in Liberty, Missouri of cancer.

Sources include:
obituary note, Stanford Magazine

The following text was affixed to the back of one of the artist's paintings and it was written for his "Redlands" exhibition (no known author):

"Patric Shannon has called himself an old-fashioned painter who enjoys the abstract expressionist's manipulation of and response to the plastic means of space, light, color, line and texture.  In contrast with painting which reflects current forms of realism, his canvases do not compete with the camera's pictures of the outside world. Instead, they express the life of the inner world of mind, imagination and feelings as those respond to the plastic elements that engage the eye.
 
That is the world present in this exhibition, even though all the paintings are landscapes - some are more abstract than others.  As the title of the exhibition - "Redlands" - implies, these paintings celebrate the richly colored earth and broad space of the painter's native Oklahoma.  Titles of individual paintings, in fact, are all Oklahoma place names.  However, no painting pictures the place for which it is named, or indeed any single place.  None is a pictorial record.  Rather, these paintings are lyrical evocations.  They express responses to the space and light which dominate the Southwestern landscape, to the great light-filled open sky, the sweep of land below it, and the dynamic rock and earty formations which punctuate the land.
 
Shannon was born in 1920 in Durant, Oklahoma, in the part of the Indian Territory designated for the Choctaw Nation, he is one sixteenth Choctaw.  He is a graduate of Standford Universty and earned his Master's degree in painting from the University of California (Berkeley), where he also did graduate work in art history.  In his career of academic and museum work he served as professor of art at Austin College (Texas), docent training director for the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, Educational Assistant to the Director of the Oakland Art Gallery (California), and Director of the Oklahoma Art Center.  His painings have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Oakland Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and private galleries."

Information provided by Dirk Soulis Auctions