Commentary
To look at an artist’s career is to become aware of a unique confluence of history, style, and personality that has yielded the lifetime of work before us. We can even chart a shifting index of influences from one phase of work to the next. But beyond a calculus of time and temperament lies a mystery: the arising of creation itself, transcending both history and biography.
This is especially true with Sheila Isham’s fifty-year career, replete as it is with significant periods of living abroad, each with its own particular cultural sensibility. And Isham has not just visited, rather she has immersed herself deeply as an artist while living in Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, Haiti, and India.
But what is equally striking is the sense of deep continuity that runs through the diverse phases of her art. First, Isham’s paintings are marked by sense of ever-moving energy, revealed clearly in the unbroken stream of work that continues to this day. We observe one series after another coming into being, with a kind of quiet exuberance. The shifts of subject or palette only highlight the sense of becoming that animates Isham’s paintings whether of clouds of cosmic light, seas of floating color, mythic animals, or phantasmagoric landscapes.
Second, throughout Isham’s work we sense the sacred being celebrated in the very concrete terms that this world provides. Rather than a feeling of religiosity, we have the mythic, rather than impersonal awe we have the personal, in the form of the artist, as a vehicle for the spirit. This cosmic sense is invoked in succession of forms: as the universal energies embodied in classic Chinese ideograms, as the fecund Earth alive with creation, and even in the sense of suffering and renewal in the Victoria Series, that honors the loss of the artist’s daughter. Special note should be taken of Isham’s sense of cosmic intimacy when it comes to the members of the animal realm. She has shown the escapades of creatures and humans at play in their common Eden, individual beasts alert and wise, peaceable kingdoms of animals together, and the great bull, the mythic force of power and creation as a gentle protector.
As viewers of Sheila Isham’s work, we become, like her, witnesses to the coming into being of both form and consciousness, a manifesting of an energy beyond the artist’s ultimate control, that both transcends and unfolds in this world.
– John Mendelsohn
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