Biography

Shaun McFee was born in Kitchener, ON, the city where he resides and works from.

As a youngster, McFee was drawn to art. The passion that would arise was fueled by being put into painting lessons around the fifth grade. After those experiences, McFee knew that painting and art would be a huge part of his life.

Through his late teens and 20's, he worked primarily in oils, but also graphite and coloured pencils, creating surrealism-based artwork, influenced by artists such a Dali and Magritte. It was during these later years that McFee re-located to Montreal, where he created work mostly on found surfaces like wood and veneers.

At 30 years old, after having returned from living in Montreal, McFee moved from Kitchener to Vancouver. This would prove to be a very pivotal time for McFee.

Working in the emerging sector between technology companies and business development, he found it difficult to make time for studio practices and also lacked adequate space living downtown Vancouver. So faced, with the choice of giving it up, or cramming it in, McFee made the decision to see what it would be like to work and volunteer in galleries and museums. This led to a very busy 13 year period of helping to bring the arts to the public, assisting institutions such as The Vancouver Art Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, and THEMUSEUM.

As he spent time in these, and other, art centres, McFee found a new passion in teaching and facilitating art programs. And all the while, he treated this time as educational, where he learned about a massive variety of art, artists, art practices, curation, and arts programming.

Yet he still had not, save for a few little sessions here and there over the years, picked up a paintbrush for his own purposes.

He recalls a point in this time that, when thinking about his own art-making, that a recurring thought was, “I need to tear it all down”. By which he means to start from scratch, let his old art processes, imagery, pre-conceived notions, etc., go, and start fresh. It was awhile later that a couple that McFee grew up with approached him to do a commission. After conferring with the friends and embracing the project, he knew now was the time to again start painting.

And so he has, and since then, he hasn't stopped.

McFee's current body of work has been based on squares, grids, and right-angled geometry. Working with acrylics on canvas McFee paints with a process that involves the work going through many iterations or phases. Influences in this work, to name a few include Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Sean Scully, Piet Mondrian, and M.C. Escher.

There are pictures under pictures. Maybe a layer is a realized picture, maybe it is washes or brush textures. McFee takes the formal and orderly division of space through grids and squares and adds some chaos by not adhering to the mathematical, instead, going on his own judgment and feeling of visual communication. He seeks to make suggestions of images that are sometimes obvious, and sometimes not obvious, to perhaps evoke memories or imaginative experiences. Like seeing through a filter or a window - where a snapshot of a world is transformed by squares and grids, sometimes sharp-edged, sometimes blurry.

Is it a landscape? Is it an aerial view of the country-side? Is it an object? McFee wants the viewer to contemplate their own ideas.

McFee uses this process to achieve the highly rich colour palette he is striving for. He finds that only though layering can this be realized. Any given square or on canvas has multiple colours underneath. In many cases, colour is taken straight from the tube, but once layered onto another, it creates its own individual hue.

He likes to think that painting has lived a life of its own before even coming off the easel. Its own stories, its own record of existence. It's own experiences.

Lately, McFee has been creating work that intersects his square and grid work with his own idea of Post-Impressionism and Minimalism.