Intro

My name is Shannon. It's taken me a long time to appreciate that. I've hated my name, never relating to any other Shannon i've ever known, my grandmother and my godmother (who are very interesting women) had much more interesting names, like Bridget and Frances, and i was so much more interesting than this name; clearly i was not meant to be a Shannon. I've nicknamed myself all sorts of variations of Shannon, eventually i just went by a nickname based off of my grandma's name, also my middle name, Frankie.

For sometime now i've been doing art under a pen name; Sardu. I validated this through my fairly recent discovery of 50% of my heritage, found in meeting my father a few years back and mixing his last name with the name of the country my previously unknown ancestors come from. In the last four years in fact (including meeting my father), i've had some monumental happenings, devastations, road blocks, growth spurts, and bridges burned. I have tried to be a bird in the wind, taking everything as it came, not blaming the universe, seeing humility in seeing myself, not trying to force situations, etc. Aside from some evenings at a pub and some long walks, i've generally kept all of this bottled in for four years. If it ever spilled out, i promptly stuffed it back in and refused to deal with it. This is unlike the bird in the wind. Throughout 2009, somehow i had obtained even more emotional and mental baggage. Still not really dealing with it appropriately, i continued to go forward, not taking time for myself. So- for some time now, i've not been myself.

Which got me asking, about this self. Who was this person I'd become? Was the old me still in there? Was the old me, the real me? I had so many questions...

Eventually i realized, that i had to start from square one. I had to get to know myself. And how do you go about that? The same way you would get know anyone, you greet them, and ask them their name.

I surprised myself by choosing Shannon. It means little owl.

Welcome to my Art Blog.