My Special Art Teacher, Shauna Shane

Castro Point, Florida — the finished piece from George and Shauna's joint teacher-student painting day at the Thames River Gallery.

Their work together played out in public once, at the Thames River Gallery in New London, CT, where Shane had been asked to bring a student along for a joint instructor-and-student painting day — a whole studio full of teachers, each paired with a student, working in front of visitors who wandered in and stopped to ask questions. Shane picked George, even though he wasn't actively taking her class at the time.

"I was kind of blown away that she would pick me," he says. She pinned a photo to the wall — two sailboats — and the two of them painted the same scene side by side while the public watched and Shane fielded questions from the room.

That painting, Castro Point, Florida — is one of the pieces George still points to when he talks about what her guidance actually did to his work.

George has been painting alongside Shauna since 2019, when he wandered into a Tuesday morning class at the West Hartford Art League that was open to anyone who wanted to show up with any medium at all. He didn't know yet that the woman running it had spent over three decades as a professional painter, served as a resident artist at Yellowstone National Park, and been selected in 2008 as a resident artist at the New Britain Museum of American Art. He just knew there was a class on Tuesdays, and that anyone was welcome to sit in.

Shane works across oil, watercolor, pastel, glass, and sculpture out of her Fenton River Studio, a converted button factory and destination garden in Storrs, Connecticut, where she's built a koi pond, a living-roof chicken coop, and a cottage garden full of her own cement-cast sculpture. She's on staff these days at UCONN's Community School of Art, the Glastonbury Art Guild, and the West Hartford Art League, and somehow still finds time to teach concrete casting of flowers and leaves, cast giant lawn turtles, and mount a full exhibit every year at the regional home and garden show.

"She must be close to eighty now, and she deals with arthritis in her hands," George says, "and she just keeps going. She paints amazingly, and she's got all these irons in the fire at once."

Ask him what she actually taught him, and George doesn't hesitate: composition, and color. "I'll start a painting and she'll tell me to wipe it off. 'No, that doesn't work.' And I should do a completely different composition — I do, and it just makes so much sense."

She's still teaching every week, still at Fenton River, still findable through her studio or on Facebook under her own name. And after six years, George says what she gave him wasn't just technique.

"She instilled a lot of confidence in me," he says. Then, laughing: "Her main thing, when we gather around with people, is that she says I've become better than her — and that's why she hates me. She says that to everyone".