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Shelly Terman Canton
1930–1986
BirthplaceChicago, Illinois, United States of America
Death placeUnited States of America
BiographyShelly Terman Canton was a painter, printmaker, and illustrator known for her sensitive figural works. Born Michelle Terman, daughter of a concert pianist and a businessman in Chicago, Canton began drawing as a child. She studied for a year at the University of Iowa with printmaker Mauricio Lasansky (b. 1914) before moving to New York in 1948, at the age of eighteen, to pursue a professional art career. Her illustrations were featured in Seventeen magazine and her artworks were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and Carlback Gallery, where they attracted the notice of Ben Shahn (1898-1969), the Lithuanian-born American creator of social realist paintings and prints. By 1951, however, Canton had returned to Chicago following a short-lived marriage, and with a young daughter.
Canton resumed art-making after several years' hiatus. In 1956 she had solo exhibitions at Chicago's Studio 47 East and Gilman Galleries. In 1958, at the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition of works by Chicago artists (held that year at Navy Pier), she won the Pauline Palmer purchase prize for her print The Meaning of Life-People, which entered the museum's collection. She had divorced and remarried, and her second husband encouraged her artistic pursuits. For the next two decades, Canton was active as an illustrator for publications ranging from Harper's Bazaar and Playboy magazines and the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times newspapers. She showed her work widely in numerous local community exhibitions, and was represented by Feingarten Galleries in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Carmel, California.
Canton painted in oils and casein (a milk-based water-soluble medium) and created drawings in pen-and-ink with ink washes; as a printmaker she worked in lithography, linocut, and etching. As indicated in the title of her award-winning print, the human figure was her primary subject. She frequently depicted children, mothers with their offspring, and the elderly, using a realistic but emotionally charged approach, and in her late work she incorporated elements of the fantastic and surreal to comment on issues of social injustice. In the 1960s, Canton also turned to landscape painting. Her graphic work was noticeably influenced by the spare precision and linear emphasis of Japanese woodblock prints; she also studied the works of the Old Masters on a tour of Europe and northern Africa in 1959. Although relatively little known today, Canton had realized a solid success as both a commercial and a fine artist by the time of her death at age fifty-seven.
Canton resumed art-making after several years' hiatus. In 1956 she had solo exhibitions at Chicago's Studio 47 East and Gilman Galleries. In 1958, at the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition of works by Chicago artists (held that year at Navy Pier), she won the Pauline Palmer purchase prize for her print The Meaning of Life-People, which entered the museum's collection. She had divorced and remarried, and her second husband encouraged her artistic pursuits. For the next two decades, Canton was active as an illustrator for publications ranging from Harper's Bazaar and Playboy magazines and the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times newspapers. She showed her work widely in numerous local community exhibitions, and was represented by Feingarten Galleries in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Carmel, California.
Canton painted in oils and casein (a milk-based water-soluble medium) and created drawings in pen-and-ink with ink washes; as a printmaker she worked in lithography, linocut, and etching. As indicated in the title of her award-winning print, the human figure was her primary subject. She frequently depicted children, mothers with their offspring, and the elderly, using a realistic but emotionally charged approach, and in her late work she incorporated elements of the fantastic and surreal to comment on issues of social injustice. In the 1960s, Canton also turned to landscape painting. Her graphic work was noticeably influenced by the spare precision and linear emphasis of Japanese woodblock prints; she also studied the works of the Old Masters on a tour of Europe and northern Africa in 1959. Although relatively little known today, Canton had realized a solid success as both a commercial and a fine artist by the time of her death at age fifty-seven.