Biography
Sheila Isham graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1950, but her real education as an artist began later that same year in Berlin, where she moved with her husband, a Foreign Service officer. Studying at the Berlin Art Academy, Isham absorbed the work of the German Expressionists and of Kandinsky and his influential essay, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”. Her studies clarified for Isham the intimate connection between abstraction and figurative art, which would inform her painting for the next five decades.
The formative exposure to a foreign culture in Berlin also became a crucial template for the artist’s development. In 1962, Isham and her family moved to Hong Kong. There she studied with a master of calligraphy whose instruction encompassed the metaphysical dimensions of Chinese art. This encounter was expressed both in calligraphic works and two major series of paintings made after returning to Washington, DC in 1965. The first series was hard-edged and based on the circular Chinese symbol of unity. The Galaxy Series, with its spray-painted clouds of cosmic light, reflected the artist’s own sense of inner epiphany experienced in 1967. The paintings which Isham described as “an energy field”, were widely exhibited and the subject of a 1974 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art that traveling to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
1971 marked both a move to Paris with her husband and a studio fire in Washington, which destroyed much of Isham’s work. That event, along with a move to Haiti in 1974, resulted in a major shift in her paintings. She absorbed the Haitian culture’s closeness to the earth, its spirituality, and its especially its color. Isham’s work became animated with moving forms and flowing color. Major paintings, including the Cosmic Myth Series emerged from this period.
In the early 1980s, Isham’s trips to India produced both a series of large mythic landscapes and a deep involvement with spiritual practice. Meeting Swami Muktananda at an ashram lead her to the practice of Siddha yoga meditation, which she continues at a center near her home in Sagaponack, NY in eastern Long Island. Isham sees her own creative work as an expression of the universal creative energy that animates all of life. In her paintings of animals, Isham give this feeling a direct and spirited expression. She has created series of work depicting powerful bulls, arctic bears and wolves, elegant birds, and gatherings of many species.
A 2005 exhibition of the Victoria Series, created by Isham in the late 1980s in response to the loss of her daughter, was held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Two international traveling exhibitions have been sponsored by the United States Information Agency. A retrospective of her work was held in 2004 at the Russian State Museum, with an extensively illustrated catalogue. Isham’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution.
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