Shannon Stirnweis was born in Portland, Oregon in 1931 and came of age during the Great Depression, a background that likely sharpened the grit visible in much of his later work. An athlete in his youth, he competed in Golden Gloves boxing, played guard on his high school football team, and placed third in the shot put at an all-city track meet before trading the field for the studio. After a year at the University of Oregon, he transferred to the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles on a school scholarship, graduating with Distinction in 1954.
He went on to serve two years as an Army illustrator in Germany, where he painted more than thirty portraits of officers and troops in his spare time, with special assignments that would later take him to the Berlin Wall, the Everglades, Arizona, and Alaska. Returning to the States, Stirnweis found the illustration market thriving in New York and planted himself there, spending two years at a Madison Avenue advertising agency before building one of the most varied freelance careers of his generation.
His editorial clients read like a who's who of mid-century publishing: Argosy, Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, Boy's Life, Reader's Digest, Time, Popular Mechanics, and many others. He illustrated paperback covers for nearly every major publisher in New York, produced work for advertising across medical, industrial, and film industries, illustrated over 35 children's books, and wrote and illustrated three titles for the Grumbacher Library covering the art of painting dogs, cats, and the Wild West.
He served two terms as President of the Society of Illustrators in New York before shifting his focus to gallery painting, where his eye for narrative and his deep knowledge of American history made him a natural fit for Western subject matter. That final chapter of his career became the work he is perhaps best remembered for today.
