the next year.

In the meantime, another kind of painting activity had been developing in the Hawkchurch studio - now moved to a large space created on the first floor - where all of the artist's earlier, stored visual responses to material reality were slowly beginning to re-emerge in a new kind of abstracted, symbolist reality. Red River, for example, a title which will have different resonances for different people worldwide, comes out as the title for a large, post-abstract expressionist type canvas which does in fact contain a red river running across it, like a vein of red lava burning its way through dark rock. The viewer can either stand back to see it thus, or approach more closely to study the living textures of paint piled up, and dragged or combed across the canvas. Other late images seem more figural: the blasted trees in Inferno suggest a kind of apocalypse, and almost resemble people, calling to mind the universal theme of refugees, frequently rendered in art as far back as Daumier's paintings of that subject in the nineteenth century, and relevant today. With What the Moon has seen, Shields's cosmic imagery begins. At this point it would be better for the viewer to move quickly to the artist's Creation series at present on view in St. Paul's Church. Those nine large canvases, inspired by particular verses from the Book of Genesis, come with a very detailed textual gloss provided by the artist herself. They should also be read, however, in the context of the development seen here, from the real to the conceptual, bearing in mind this artist's particular sense of reality. Although Shields was plainly reaching out for a more cosmic grasp of things in her later years, a physical sense of being (and I would suggest well-being) still runs through these visionary works. They seem to project the fascination which she always had with the earthy realities of life, the kind that make visions concrete, if one can accept such a paradox. The final canvas in the Creation series, the Creation of Eve, where three women are "trying to get out of their position of subservience", as the artist expresses it, is an entirely personal and modern gloss on the imaginative text of King James's Bible. It is the reality of today which, as the artist herself well knew, can be very rough, but may on occasion be transcended.

Bruce Laughton. July 2003.