Mid-Career

In January 1946, Charles Shannon (age 32) returned to Montgomery to try to resume his life as a civilian artist. The South Shannon returned to was as altered by the four years that he spent in the military as he himself.  The deep and rapid changes occurring in Southern life during and after World War II and the emerging dominance of abstract expressionism in the world of art affected the development of his work. A process of absorbing, assimilating, and experimenting began while he turned to portraiture, teaching and the restoration of paintings to make his living.  He established a studio in the room of the small house that he and his wife Blanche, rented in the Old Cloverdale section on Dupont Street.

In late January 1946 Shannon and Bill Traylor were reunited. Shannon wrote, “In 1942 I was drafted into the Army and Traylor went north to live with some of his children. When I came back in 1946 he came back. He had not been drawing and had lost a leg to gangrene. He tried to pick up where he had left off, but it was never the same again. The welfare people discovered that he had a daughter in Montgomery, whom he had never mentioned to me, and made him get off of the street and go live with her. He was very unhappy there and longed to get back to the street. Using me as a correspondent, he tried to get a daughter in Detroit to take him in, but she urged him, for his own good, to stay where he was. In February 1947 I got a note from Bill asking me to come at once, he was in the hospital. He was in an appalling place in a very weakened condition. A few days later his daughter called to tell me her father was dead and buried.  (It would not be until 1993 that Shannon would receive documentation of Bill Traylor's true death date, October 23, 1949.)

     While Traylor lived, my urge to seek recognition for his work sprung from wanting to help and encourage him to continue. After his death that motivation was gone. Abstract expressionism was consuming the art world and there didn’t seem to be a place for Traylor or, for that matter, myself-as a representational painter, I had my own survival to think about. So the boxes of his drawings were stored away and not brought out again until twenty-five years later. "

In January 1947 Shannon served on the regional and national juries for Pepsi-Cola’s Fourth Annual Paintings of the Year art competition. There were four regional juries, each administered by three artists. The National Jury of five members was appointed to make the final selection of paintings for the show. On October 5, 1947, the exhibition opened at the National Academy of Design in New York City and  travelled to the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York, the Corcoran in Washington D.C. and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.

In the 1940’s, Container Corporation of America commissioned artists to create paintings of their native state for its United States Series of ads. Forty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and the four territories were represented. In 1947, Shannon’s painting, Alabama, was created for this series. Among the other artists selected for the United States Series were Stuart Davis, Mark Tobey and Jacob Lawrence. The paintings became part of the Container Corporation of America's art collection which was later gifted to the National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. 

In 1948-49, Charles Shannon designed and physically built, with the help of one laborer, a home-studio at Early Street in Montgomery, Alabama. He had been unable to get a G.I. loan for its construction because the design was ruled “not consistent with the houses in the neighborhood”. The studio space was large enough to be used for teaching private art classes. 

In September 1950 Shannon was selected to serve on the regional jury for American Painting Today, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, City and was invited to show a painting, Sweet Lucy Alley. The exhibition opened in December 1950 at MOMA. This was the last time Shannon exhibited his work nationally until 1974. Further invitations were denied. He felt that his current work was not appropriate for such exhibitions. Shannon did do numerous portraits in the mid-1950’s but other paintings and drawings he completed were kept strictly to himself.

In her essay, Charles Shannon, Historian Diane Gingold wrote, "His (Shannon’s) work in the fifties was characterized by experimentation in style and method. Most notable, perhaps, was the work done with Japanese and other papers sized with various glues to alter their absorbency and painted upon with different kinds of watercolors to achieve certain textual qualities... Subtle colors and the materials themselves become integral to the statement."

In April 1957 Shannon became an instructor of evening art classes at the University of Alabama Montgomery Center on Bell Street. Shannon continued to teach (part-time) there when in September 1968 it became Auburn University Extension Center, Auburn University’s initial phase in developing the Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM) campus.

On May 13, 1966, after a divorce from his first wife, Charles Eugene Shannon married Eugenia (Gina) Stovall Carter in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She was a former student and mother of three children, Rebecca (age 13), Walter (age 11) and Eugenia (Genie) (age 10).

In September 1969 Shannon joined the faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery full-time as associate professor of art. He formed the art department and taught studio classes. Shannon also was involved in designing the Art Department's two studios, gallery for exhibitions and faculty offices for the AUM campus. In September 1971 Shannon began teaching at the newly completed campus. In September 1972 Shannon wrote, Proposal for a Bachelor of Art Degree in Art at Auburn University at Montgomery. In September 1976 he was promoted to Professor. 

In the early 1970's Shannon began working on a new painting technique, at his studio on Early Street, which he called “Linens”. He gave the following description of this in an interview in 1978: “These paintings represent a search for the combination of materials most appropriate for the expression of some of my visual ideas. These works are all painted on linen, which is not stretched, and it is lighter in weight than ordinarily used for oil painting. The sizing is gesso varied in composition to achieve different textures and degrees of absorbency. The paint usually consists of dry pigment in combination with egg and water or an egg-oil emulsion, though acrylics and other water-soluble tube paints have been used.” 

During this time Shannon continued to work in other media as well, including a number of oils on canvas. Commissions to do portraits of prominent men from Birmingham increased, as well as restorations for dealers, collectors and the Alabama Archives of History,

In May of 1974, the organization of Shannon’s Bill Traylor collection began. Shannon wrote: “So the boxes of his (Bill Traylor’s) drawings were stored away and not brought out again until twenty-five years later, when I decided to show them to my wife Gina. She was excited about it, and so was I, all over again. We felt that it was important that this body of work take its place in the world."

In October 1974, Shannon’s painting, (a "Linen)”, Two Boys Fishing, was shown in the National Small Painting Exhibition, The Country Studio, Hedley, Pennsylvania. Two hundred seventy artists from forty states submitted over four hundred paintings to the jury. Eighty-four were accepted for exhibition. This was the first time a Shannon painting was exhibited nationally since 1950. In November the exhibition travelled to The Phoenix in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

In January 1978 Shannon received a Faculty Research Grant from AUM. The grant allowed him extensive weekend travel, within a two-hundred-mile radius of Montgomery, to chart locations that he felt might provide subject matter for his art. The direction that Shannon was taking in his studio and his travels on the AUM Grant in 1978, led him away from painting “Linens”, which had begun in early 1970s. 

Shannon spent much of the summer months of 1978 doing an extensive review of his own artwork. The past ten years, 1968-1978 had been productive ones, so much so, that he needed to clarify what had been accomplished before moving on. He was surprised, he said, by his positive reaction to the review. The first cataloging of his work followed. it was also encouraging that in the art world, contemporary representational art was beginning to be more acceptable.

In late Summer 1978 Shannon was contacted by art consultant Sue Wiggins, who specialized in dealing, with collectors and corporations who were acquiring work by major Southeastern artists. This led to a Shannon retrospective exhibition, The Back Forty, 1938-1978,  presented by Art/Sue Wiggins, which was held for one night at the River Room of the Montgomery Civic Center, on November 9, 1978. The exhibition of 75 works spanned Shannon’s 40-year career as a professional artist. The majority of work shown was from recent years including 11 “Linens” and 10 oils on canvas. 

A review of the exhibition in the Montgomery Advertiser and Alabama Journal, November 25, 1978 stated: “Shannon found his artistic vocabulary early and has refined it slowly and with lonely strength. No doubt his growth would have taken some different directions had he chosen to jump into the mainstream of American Art in the fifties and sixties and splash or drip in experimentation rather than to distill works such as the pastel ‘Long porch, Pink Flowers’ in their splendid serenity…. Shannon is an artist who has had the talent, the convictions, and the strength to kick against the pricks, to develop and maintain a highly individual style apart from fellow artist, art colony, or gallery support, confident in the knowledge of his own artistic rightness and integrity, not just for a few months or years but for half a lifetime.” 

In June 1979 Shannon (age 65) retired from Auburn University at Montgomery to devote full-time to painting.