"Painting famous icons like Half Dome in Yosemite National Park encourages another kind of awareness: painting in out-of-the-way spots that only a local might know, which allows me the freedom to use the landscape as a metaphor for my own purposes."
“Another first for me in this exhibition was the chance to hike into some remote spots in the Sierra Mountains with the aid of pack mules and knowledgeable friends to guide me,” Shafer says. “Those friends, who are much more experienced in the backcountry than I, had only one requirement: I was not allowed to title any paintings with the exact location of these special spots. Hence, the paintings from those excursions have been labeled with such names as, Secret Meadow and other misleading monikers.”
After receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, Shafer continued to exhibit her work and teach part-time in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1994, she moved to Lake Tahoe, a place that deepened her interest in the natural world and the metaphorical possibilities it provides for painting subjects.
She has shown widely throughout the region, including at the NMA, Churchill Arts Council, and Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum. Her work
