as in The Lights of Lochcarron and the pastel Clouds at Night. A possible analogy might be made with the landscapes evoked in the novels of Thomas Hardy (which she admired), though any attempt to make direct comparisons between her painting and his prose would be unwise. She was heard to comment, however, on his understanding of women.

In 1985 Mary Shields moved from London to Hawkchurch in Devon, to nurse her aged mother, and after the latter died she remained in the family home at The Glebe Cottage for the rest of her life. She had often painted there before, but the next fifteen years turned out to be the most productive of her career. The ambience of this locality now assumed a new intensity, and the artist worked more freely from her instinctive responses. Her powers of contemplation were further stimulated by a restlessness which sometimes drove her further afield. Several visits to the West of Scotland (where one of her sisters had lived for a time) yielded strong visual responses to locale and climate, which were again first expressed in pastels. Then a visit to Western Australia in the winter of 1987 opened her eyes to a new set of sensations: the bright, hard light of summer (as it was there) illuminated scenes of desert, scrub, and sea-shore. These she recorded on the spot with spontaneous notations, later to be worked up into rtrospective paintings. Sea Shore, Waves Breaking, of 1987-90, a large oil developed from both pastels and photographs, is one such. This two-stage mode of working, outward response followed by inward contemplation, became characteristic of Shields for the rest of her career.

A second momentous journey was made in 1989 to Iceland. This time it was for only ten days in late May, during which the artist was virtually unable to sleep at all in the continuous daylight. Consequently she spent her entire time making drawings, pastels and watercolours of various sizes and shapes, literally night and day. She sought to discover the living quality of the tundra breaking out through the rocks as they partially lost their covering of snow, the water run-off tumbling into bright blue streams running over red sand, that she could see from her window. The sky could be as bright as in Australia. These studies, too, were developed back in Devon over