Sheila Eaton Isham

Empathy with the organic world is at the heart of Sheila Isham’s oeuvre. In paintings and prints rendered over six decades, Isham sought aesthetic experience through its linkage to nature—not as reimagined representation, but as pure abstract form. Her filaments of light, arcing undulations, and sprays of prismatic color opened the expressive potential of painting in her time. Isham drew on an array of philosophical and cultural tropes to constitute her own practice, gleaned from the years she spent in Germany, Russia, China, Haiti, and India accompanying her husband, a career diplomat, to several postings in his capacity as a foreign service officer. Isham’s absorption of various cultures, however, served principally to inform her own very personal practice, which plumbed a spiritual interiority transmitted through the physical act of applying paint to canvas. 

This is the compelling contradiction in Isham’s work, a contradiction that charges the viewing experience. Even as she does not wholly reject a materialist approach to her art, Isham does invert the modernist process, marking the objective world—nature—as subjective experience. 

Painting for me is a spiritual act—an act of transmitting the visions of the subconscious into form, line, and color through which the rhythms and symbols of our time can sing out. In expressing those intensely personal symbols, I would like to reach beyond the immediate and illuminate the hidden shadows. It is with great reverence and a minimum of intellectual editing that I respect the guiding hand in my work. [i]

Isham’s identification with nature and its atmospheric reflections follows centuries-old traditions in Eastern artistic renderings. Whether depicting the “sacred symbol” of the circle—the bi symbol of heaven floating in colorscapes; or elaborating Chinese calligraphy based on her studies with master Feng Kanghou; or embedding Nandi, the guardian bull of Shiva in whorls of color— Isham over-sprays found objects with acrylic paint using an air brush to elicit aesthetic patterns from what are otherwise naturally occurring phenomena. In ancient Chinese painting, artists might cull images from the spreading of mold on a surface; the concavities of unpainted silk impressed on a wall; the residue of impressions from inked lotus fruit or grass slippers.[ii] Like these former masters, Isham does not merely illustrate. Rather, she uses found objects, such as sponges and seaweed, which she sprays with prismatic acrylic paint as she holds them against canvas. When lifted off, what remains is a melding of the natural world with chance operations, color forms that recreate sky- and land-scapes, a mode of painting that delivers interiority folded outward in reductive chromatic stylizations. [figs. 1 and 2] 

Thus, Isham’s appropriation of various cultural symbols such as the calligraphic mark or tantric personifications of myth, serve as personal stimuli to “open[. . . ] up a reservoir of images and forms, lifting the veil and getting deeper into the subconscious.”[iii] Isham’s creation of form-impressions culled from the natural world expresses less an act of intentional effects than of receptivity to random combinatorial phenomena: 

When I’m painting, everything comes in that needs to come in. It’s almost like automatic. The objects that I pick up—like some of the objects that I may find lying on the beach or they’ll be here on the floor. The right one will almost jump into my hands.[iv]

Isham’s rich, effervescent patterns present abstractions in line with the most advanced transcendental abstract expressions that have evolved through centuries of Eastern thought. Many of her series are also in dialogue with more recent visionary transcendental abstractionists, such as Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, and Agnes Pelton, who sought to make the spiritually ineffable visible. She is also of her time, engaging with the methods and formal trends of painter-colleagues of the Washington Color School, such as Anne Truitt, who also looked to the East for inspiration.[v] Her occasional move into schematic representation resonates with the oscillation between untethered gesture and delimiting contour. Precedents abound, for example, Elaine de Kooning’s Cave Walls series, from the 1980s, loosely brushed impressions inspired by prehistoric cave paintings of Southwest France.[vi] Isham’s own “Cosmic Earth Bull” series of a decade later, derive from a similar conflation of the human and animal worlds. In assimilating Western art traditions, imagery, and techniques to her preoccupation with ethno-cultural archetypes, Isham effects a “return [. . .] to ancient mythical symbols.”[vii] In this regard, Isham’s work is a hybridization of metaphysics and contemporary materialism.

Isham is that rare artist who synthesizes conceptual—or what can be understood as visionary material abstraction—with the physical stuff of advanced artmaking methods that were informed by contemporary Western traditions. Incorporating industrial air compressors, a spray-painting technique used in early modernist paintings by El Lizistky as well as by her painting-colleagues David Smith and Jules Olitski, Isham creates bold, spiritually informed abstractions. She was drawn to seek an understanding of the world by bringing to her art a universal beauty, one that was a meditative act, a means of expressing her own clear-sighted, waking vision. 

Born in 1927 in New York City, Isham was deeply influenced by her father, who, she claimed, was “her first teacher in art.”[viii]Progressing through traditional Western art techniques, she took up the airbrush in the 1960s, as did other modernists, building on her traditional studio-school education. The only foreigner accepted at the famed Hochschule für Bildende Kunste (Berlin Academy of Fine Arts) at the time, she spent the next four years, 1950–1954, studying drawing, painting, and the graphic arts with various masters of the German Expressionist group, Die Brücke. Tracing the routes of her husband’s career, Isham moved fluidly between Washington, D.C., Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, Paris, Haiti, and New Delhi, and was given access to special collections, paintings that otherwise were not on public view, and introductions to master teachers. Through her drive to absorb this vast range of influences, Isham encountered opportunities as well as resistances along the way—for example, being apprehended on the count of “espionage” in Moscow by “vigilant citizens” for painting scenes out of doors in the later 1950s. Her studies at the Pratt Graphic Workshop in New York and American University in Washington, D.C. exposed her to recent trends in American contemporary art as well as reinforced her earlier studies in traditional Western art at the University of Geneva and Bryn Mawr College in the 1940s. Joining her husband in Hong Kong in 1962, Isham spent three years learning brush calligraphic techniques from the Tang Dynasty along with Bronze Age oracle bone script under the aegis of a master. But it was in 1965, upon her return to the United States, that Isham was finally able to conflate European and Asian influences and contemporary American techniques by aligning the airbrush application of paint spray with her limpid chromatic palette in rendering the trace of found forms and cultural symbols (figs. 4 and 5). 

 When, in 1974, her husband was appointed Ambassador to Haiti, Isham energetically pursued an understanding of local tradition, in particular the Vodou religious fetishistic icons of human figures and animals. Her collage series from this period embeds collaged cutout lithographs in chromatic atmospheres of sprays and brush techniques. [figs. 6 and 7] 

Such works bring to mind recent elaborations of the black silhouette in three dimensions by artists such as Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Muti (fig. 8) and earlier modernists of the Harlem Renaissance, such as James Weldon Johnson (fig. 9), who used the black silhouette as a form of inclusive visual rhetoric that might cross cultural and ethnic boundaries, much as Isham did in her collages.[ix]

A convergence of influences has informed Isham’s visual vocabulary over several decades and stimulated an imagination already rich in intellect and open to exploration. Throughout, her masterly control of painterly techniques has been placed in the service of her porousness to the world around her and to the many modes by which artists throughout time and across cultures have grappled with and expressed responses to the natural world. From this vast repertoire, Isham has constituted a specific voice and a distinctive aesthetic realization, a signature style in the truest sense. Her rapport with natural phenomena is its through-line, and the visual forms of this empathic interaction are uniquely her own.  

– Patricia L Lewy, Director of the Sheila Isham Archives

[i] Sheila Isham quoted in a brochure with a text by Edward Fry for an exhibition at Skyfields, her studio on Long Island, c1984. Sheila Eaton Isham Estate Archives.
[ii] Tseng Yuho, “‘Abstraction’ in the Traditional Art of East Asia,” in Jeffrey Wexler, Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction 1945–1970, ed. Jeffrey Wexler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 21.
[iii] Sheila Isham quoted in “Translating Her Inner World,” The Statesman, January 6, 1989, unnamed reporter.
[iv] Film, “Sheila Isham”: directed and edited by Luc Cote, music composed by Sunderdas Giron. Shot on locations at “Skyfields,” Sagaponack, Long Island, NY and in New York City, 77 Park Avenue, April 1984.
[v] Anna Lovatt, “Turning,” in Anne Truitt in Japan (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2015).
[vi] See “Elaine de Kooning,” Cave Walls Series, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/elaine-de-kooning)
[vii] Sheila Isham in conversation with Ajit Duara, “The Mythical Connection,” Times of India, Bombay, January 17, 1989.
[viii] Sheila Isham quoted in  “Sheila Isham: Nature, Energy, and Art,” The Easthampton Star, January 6, 2005. 
[ix] The complications of the silhouette as visual coding and the racially charged issues that arise from its use have been taken up with bold irony and aggression by the artist Kara Walker. For a full discussion this artist and the history of this artistic process, see Frank Mehring, “How Silhouettes Became ‘Black’: The Visual Rhetoric of the Harlem Renaissance,” in François Brunet, Circulation, The Terra Foundation Essays 3 (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art and the University of Chicago Press, 2017), 174–208.