Shane Johnson grew up on the shores of Cork Harbour and went to school in Cork City, on the south coast of Ireland. After school, he went to the Crawford School of Art in Cork, and then to the College of marketing and Design in Dublin to study Visual Communications. Illustration was what interested him most. After a few years working in Graphic Design, Illustration, and even Advertising, he began to turn his work into original paintings inspired by summers spent in West Cork. The rolling landscape, brightly painted towns and villages, and the deeply indented coastline featured strongly in illustrative paintings exhibited there from the early 1990s. Paintings of Dublin, where he had made his home, followed, and were inspired by its very different, but equally inspiring urban coastline.

Shane has worked solely as an artist since the mid 1990s. He uses his quirky illustrative style, a designer’s sense of composition, a very bold intensity of colour, and often a sprinkling of a sense of humour to capture the essence of a place in his own peculiar way, be it real of imaginary, coastal, rural or urban. He paints with acrylics on canvas in a very broad range of sizes.

He has exhibited in Dublin, Cork and London, and over the years has had many paintings commissioned, both private and corporate. Corporate commissions of note include Parknasilla Hotel, University College Cork, 3Arena Dublin, Fishy Fishy Restaurant Kinsale and Junk Kouture. One well known admirer, actress and author Pauline McLynn has opened several of Shane’s exhibitions, the playfulness and sense of humour in his work reflecting her own personality. Another, garden designer Diarmuid Gavin, was taken with Shane’s “lollipop” trees, which were similar to his own design at Chelsea Flower Show that year.