About Artist Shilo Ratner
"I don't paint a picture of a place. I paint what it felt like to be there."
Shilo Ratner is a geometric abstract painter who rebuilds landscape from the shapes underneath it. For twenty years she has turned mountains, coastlines, and shifting light into layered compositions of color and form. They are paintings made for the second look, and the third, collected across the United States and abroad.
EXHIBITED AT MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART MARIN · SELECTED BY CURATORS FROM THE GUGGENHEIM & LACMA · BEST IN SHOW, GREENWICH ART SOCIETY
The Practice
Ratner's work sits between observation and construction. Each painting begins in a real landscape, but the finished work doesn't describe that place. It rebuilds it from its underlying structure: the way terrain tightens into ridges and breaks open, the intervals between planes, the way light reorganizes a mountain from one hour to the next.
At the center of the practice is a concern with how we see. Her compositions reveal themselves gradually. A viewer registers color first, then shape, and only later perhaps a mountain or a shoreline. In a culture that scrolls past nearly everything, the paintings are built to slow looking down and reward sustained attention.
Two Coasts, One Structure
Ratner grew up in Brant Rock, Massachusetts, a coastal town of open water and wide horizon. She later lived and studied in Northern California, among fog-soaked hills and a very different coastline. The two landscapes couldn't look more different, but painting them revealed what they share: a quiet order holding everything together. Today she works from her studio in Connecticut and still finds her subjects by being out in them, snowboarding in winter and on the trail or the water the rest of the year.
Process
Ratner paints in acrylic on canvas, building each composition one geometric shape at a time. Every shape informs the next: its placement, its scale, its color. Some decisions are precise and deliberate; others emerge in the act of painting. In some works, spray-painted outlines give forms a hard edge against the surrounding color. Her collages carry the same logic to an intimate scale, cut and layered from hand-painted paper and canvas on archival Rives BFK.
Living with the Work
Because color responds to light, the paintings change over the course of a day. They read one way in morning sun and another in evening lamplight. They hold a room from across the space and keep offering something new up close. Collectors often say they notice things months after a painting is hung.
Exhibitions & Recognition
Ratner's work has been selected by curators, critics, and jurors including Rita González (LACMA), Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães (Guggenheim), critic Dore Ashton, painter Theophilus Brown, Dean Sobel, Donna Seager, and David Max Horowitz.
She has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Marin, Mystic Museum of Art, Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, Greenwich Art Society, and Candita Clayton Gallery. She received the Dagny Hultgreen Award for Best in Show at the Greenwich Art Society's 103rd Annual Bendheim Exhibit.
She holds an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and a BA in Design from Curry College.
Public Art
Her site-specific work has been installed at Southern Connecticut State University's School of Business and the VCU Health Liver Transplant Unit. At San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, Intel Corporation acquired her paintings Hearts and Hero Heart for the hospital's collection.
Collect, Commission, Exhibit
Original paintings and works on paper are available directly from the studio. Ratner also works with collectors, interior designers, and architects on commissioned paintings, each developed in close consultation around the space, its light, and its palette. Curators and institutions are welcome to inquire about exhibition opportunities.
To inquire about a commission, contact Shilo directly at shiloratner@gmail.com
Explore available work:
Original paintings →
Works on paper →
All available work →
Grounded in Nature. Defined by Form.
Shilo Ratner is a Connecticut-based geometric abstract artist creating original paintings, works on paper, and fine-art prints for private collectors, interior designers, and contemporary interiors.
