About Artist Shan Watters
Shan Watters is an artist and author whose entire career has been in the visual arts. Painting murals on freeways for the 1984 Olympics, with the famous Los Four led to apprenticing with two celebrated California artists, Frank Romero and Peter Alexander. These activities led to her working with Lonny Gans and Associates, an art consulting firm specializing in corporate collections.
Shan became interested in representing lesser-known artists and owned and directed L.A. Art, specializing in Southern California artists and The Sports and Entertainment Gallery, celebrating figurative art in both genres. These were unique award-winning galleries in LA that emphasized public involvement through events geared around LA sports teams, musicians, artists, and actors that benefitted charities.
Later Shan began to be interested in other models for artmaking that focused on art and peacekeeping. Subsequently she created and taught an arts and peacekeeping curriculum in Los Angeles and Hawaii utilizing a 40 foot-canvas labyrinth as a meditation vehicle for students.
Shan also worked as the Project Coordinator of the Shi-tro Mandala for Universal Peace Project under the auspices of H. E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. This was a five-year venture that supported Tibetan master artists as they built the first, three-dimensional traditional Tibetan Mandala in the U.S. Subsequently she co-created Tools for Peace, an arts curriculum that used the Mandala as the basis for teaching peacekeeping in schools, juvenile detention centers, retreat centers and summer camps throughout California and continues to serve over one million people today.
She holds degrees in Fine Art and Anthropology and is a lifelong student of His Eminence Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche and the Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo. She has also received teachings and empowerments from many esteemed Tibetan Masters and Yogis.
Upon retirement she accomplished her lifelong dream of becoming a full-time artist, exhibiting in various Los Angeles fine art galleries. Her work reflects her devotion to excellence and has evolved into intuitive, contemplative abstract paintings. Her most recent body of work is entitled “Colors of the Seasons”, that delights in the beauty of the seasons in the Flathead Valley, Montana where she and her husband George and their beloved Buzz now reside. Her studio looks out over the valley and the surrounding mountains and is a lively place where local artists gather and her grandchildren and their friends learn to paint and make art.