About me, my studio, and what I make
Bio
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I’m Shane Monds, a Houston-based multi-disciplinary artist working primarily as a printmaker. My background is split between music and visual art. I’m a classically trained musician and composer, and I studied art at Louisiana State University during my undergraduate years alongside formal musical training. I took to printmaking in 2007, and it has remained an undercurrent in my creative life for nearly two decades.
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Since 2024, I’ve been working commercially as a printmaker, honing my craft through consistent production, often completing close to a dozen works per month. Some of those pieces are represented here, spanning both commissioned work and small editions.
My love of printmaking began with the classics, like Dürer and Rembrandt, but I’m especially moved by German Expressionist woodcuts and their ability to carry emotional weight through large black fields, tension, and dense micro-cut detail. I’m drawn to the way relief printing can hold both restraint and intensity at once. During my art studies, I was also deeply influenced by the lithographs of Miró and Picasso, and that influence remains visible in my ongoing focus on mark-making as a primary expressive tool.
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I work across a wide range of commissions each month and take particular joy in bringing ideas to life through relief printing’s unique visual voice. The medium’s physicality and immediacy matter to me. I don’t work in printmaking for the sake of producing large commercial editions—I work in it because the process and the result feel inseparable.
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As a musician and composer, I approach visual art as inherently collaborative and situational. Each piece responds to a specific idea, person, place, or moment. That mindset shapes how I work: tailoring each image to what it needs to be, rather than imposing a fixed philosophy or aesthetic across everything I make.
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What began as late-night personal decompression for nearly twenty years has now become a professional practice—one I’m deeply invested in, and grateful to pursue with focus and intention.
My work centers on creating affordable, tailored commissions through hand-carved, hand-pulled relief prints alongside limited edition prints.
Each project begins with an idea (usually from someone close to me or a client. It is sometimes clear, sometimes still forming. I find that my role is to translate that into a physical image that fits both the subject and this unique medium. I focus on restraint, intentional mark-making and design that is quietly arresting.