A Beastly Show At The Southampton Cultural Center

Sheila Isham carefully folded her hands in her lap, lightly rocking in her chair. The artist scanned her 2,800-square-foot studio in Southampton, and then glanced at the handful of canvases arranged in a semicircle around her.

As she inhaled, the corners of her mouth played at a slight smile.

“These are my animals,” she breathed out, unclasping her hands and motioning to the colorful paintings on display.

Ms. Isham’s “animals” will roam out of the studio and into the Southampton Cultural Center on Thursday, March 1. Ms. Isham’s exhibit “The Beast In Art”—featuring two-dozen abstract-figurative paintings, collages and drawings of feathered to furry creatures—will remain on view through Wednesday, March 28.

This is Ms. Isham’s debut solo show at the Cultural Center after her “Best of Show” win during its first annual juried exhibition this past October.

“In terms of Sheila’s exhibition, it promises to be a fine, representative presentation of her work,” Cultural Center Resident Curator Arlene Bujese wrote in an email last month. “She is a highly regarded and widely acclaimed artist.”

Ms. Isham’s work has trotted the globe, showing in the renowned galleries of the Corcoran Musem of Art and the Smithsonian Art

Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New Orleans, and museums in Germany, Central Europe and Russia, to name a few.

But she had humble beginnings like anyone else, the 84-year-old said. In fact, Ms. Isham didn’t discover her knack for art until her college days, she said, though her love for and fascination with nature began when she was a young girl—6 years old, to be exact.

“My grandfather had explored an island in the Saint Lawrence River in Canada, so as a child, I spent summers exploring nature,” she recalled. “I think that’s where the attachment began because it was simple. We could drink the water in the river and I really, really learned as a child to live off the land. We had a few sheep on the island, and fish.”

It wasn’t until 1950, when Ms. Isham attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, that she knew art was her future, she said. The same year, she married her husband, Heyward, a foreign service officer, and moved to Germany where she studied at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.

She was the only foreigner attending the school, she said. The devastated country was still recovering from World War II, and the art academy became a refuge for local artists—renowned and undiscovered alike.

There, her modern-day style, and focus on subject matter, was born.

“We were doing both abstraction and figurative work,” Ms. Isham recalled. “We had to do both. For the figurative, we had to go to the zoo twice a week in Berlin. That’s where the animals first started.”

Ms. Isham followed her husband all over the world for his foreign affairs work, and redefined hers at every stop. Their first stop was Moscow.

“It was tricky because I was followed all the time there,” she said. “I was there in 1955 under the Soviet system, and it was very suspicious to have somebody out drawing on the streets. So I was constantly followed by the KGB. In some ways, I took pleasure in going in very cold weather, sketching these ancient Russian houses in 10 below zero, leaving them watching, following. It was an amazing time.”

From 1962 to 1965, the couple lived in Hong Kong. It didn’t take long for Ms. Isham to see that her work didn’t fit into the local culture, she said. The artist ditched her abstract expressionist style and picked up brush-stroking, she said. She studied under a Chinese calligraphy master for three years until returning home to Washington, D.C.

“With all these influences from the east and coming home again, I really experienced a big breakthrough,” she said. “It was as if it was a spiritual breakthrough.”

Two years later, in 1967, Ms. Isham visited the Hamptons for the first time with a poet friend from Manhattan, she said. Soon after, she found herself buying her present-day studio space, just as it was being constructed. In 1970, the couple settled down on the East End and built a house in Sagaponack.

“Why the Hamptons?” she mused. “I liked the feeling of earth and sea and sky. It was that combination. I felt nature very close. I was inspired by change. The way the sky interacts with the earth and how the sea plays a role. It’s always there, that interplay between the three.”

But inevitably, Ms. Isham’s husband’s travels took her away from her studio in Southampton, and their Sagaponack home. In the mid-1970s the couple travelled to Haiti and to India in the late 1980s. They visited the East End in between trips.

When they returned, Ms. Isham painted only images of bulls for seven years.

“The bull is an ancient, ancient animal,” she said. “It goes back, way back in prehistoric times, to cavemen. Being in India and seeing what a prominent place the bull took, being at the feet of one of the gods, Shiva, for some reason it just sank in.”

One bull piece, an oil on linen, will appear in Ms. Isham’s upcoming show, as well as paintings of single, large animals, such as an elephant and an eagle, and group pictures of cats and seals.

Her collages, made from colorful, handmade Nepalese paper, which won her “Best in Show” and the exhibit, will also be on view.

“I cut out animals I find in here, in the paper,” she said, and as she flipped through a standing rack of collages. She noted of each one: “A dance, a talking, a dialogue, a play, a nose-to-nose. It’s all there. In the paper. In the animals.”

“The Beast In Art” art exhibition by Sheila Isham will open on Thursday, March 1, at the Southampton Cultural Center and will remain on view through Wednesday, March 28. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 3, from 4 to 7 p.m. For more information, call 283-6297 or email anneholton@optonline.net.