Local artist Shannon Grissom has been nominated for four awards
for her locally broadcast community television shows.
Hollister – Local artist Shannon Grissom has been nominated for four awards for her locally broadcast community television shows.
Grissom was nominated for the Western Access Video Excellence awards for both her regular series, an instructional show teaching people how to paint, and two specials. One of those specials was on the Hollister homeless shelter and another was an experimental show animating her paintings.
Her show competes with programs from throughout the Western region of the United States, from the Rocky Mountains to Hawaii. The final winners will be announced at a ceremony Oct. 26, she said.
Though she has been nominated for awards in the past, she said it was exciting to get the additional recognition for the specials.
“I was really surprised. I feel like this year is just awesome,” Grissom said.
She launched her show, “Give Your Walls Some Soul,” in 2003. At that time she said she “knew nothing” about TV. She said she got the idea for putting together a series out of a desire to teach painting.
“I wanted to teach but I didn’t have a lot of time to teach classes, and this way I could reach hundreds of people at one time. And I also really wanted to increase my marketing and exposure,” Grissom said. “It was two fold: for other people and also for myself.”
Since its launch, the show has had continued success, Grissom said. In March, the program was picked up by 34 other stations across the United States, and it has even been picked up by a Public Broadcasting System station in Tennessee.
“My show is a cross between – I have the comfort of Bob Ross but the energy of Emeril,” Grissom said.
Grissom said the best response on the show was from an 80-year-old Santa Cruz man. He called to tell her for his birthday he was planning to buy himself a set of paints. He had never painted before, he told her, but her show inspired him to start.
She also gets calls from people telling her they have no interest in art but that her show entertains them. She’ll take either compliment, she said. Eventually, she hopes to get picked up by a major network – HDTV or the Learning Channel.
“It’s weird to be a painter and then to do the whole TV show – it takes a lot out of you,” she said. “When I got the e-mail with all these awards I thought, ‘Cool. I’m doing something right.'”
