A life in art: Shani at 70

Shani Rhys James is celebrating her 70th birthday with a major exhibition in London. She told Jenny White about her career to date – and what drives her art...

NEarly 50 years ago, Shani rhys James was sitting in a shepherd’s hut in Spain where she had travelled during her year out after school. She had a place to study drama at Birmingham, following in the footsteps of her actor parents, but the I Ching had other ideas.

“I’d been torn between acting or painting and art, but then I was sitting in a shepherd’s house in the middle of Spain with a friend and I threw the I Ching and I got ‘the Creative,’” she says. “I decided I had to get back to london and apply for art school.”

She hitchhiked much of the way home and enrolled on a foundation course at loughborough College of Art and Design before completing her degree at St Martins.

Now, on the cusp of turning 70, she’s one of Wales’ most celebrated living artists – and will be marking her birthday with a major retrospective at Connaught Brown gallery in london. The show takes a broad sweep through her whole career, from her student days at St Martins through to her recent work.

As an artist who has long drawn inspiration from her life and from her family, the show can in some ways be read as autobiographical. Born in Melbourne in 1953 to a Welsh father and Australian mother, Shani suffered as a child from thrombocytopenia, a condition which can cause bleeding – and it’s hard not to think of this when looking at the blood red hues of her paintings.

She moved to london with her mother when she was nine, where her mother continued her career in acting. She did not see her father again for decades.

Much of her work explores themes of childhood dislocation, isolation and lack of control over one’s destiny. Her relationship with her mother is another strong current in her work.

These themes come together in Blue Top, a painting depicting her mother, totem-like, beside Shani, hidden apart from her head, against a livid red background and a black chandelier.

“It’s about coming to Britain and, in a sense, the dislocation of the child from her own body,” she says. “It’s about the way a child is subjected to the decisions a parent makes. They’re not in control.

“My mother was a single parent at that time and we were in our own little worlds, going through our own crises of coming to Britain from Australia and arriving in london in the worst winter ever – two foot thick of snow – and having nowhere to go to live.

“It must have been an absolute nightmare for my mother and I’m trying to capture the way you can be quite isolated in whatever you are going through.”

Similar themes emerge in Chicken Coop III, made after she met her father and Australian cousins again, aged 37. It shows a girl standing alone beside a chicken coop in an Australian landscape against a vivid cerulean sky.

“It’s not a cosy painting – it’s about just realising as a child that you are on your own and a sense of being isolated in the countryside – like we are here.”

By ‘here’ she means her home in Wales where she and her artist husband Stephen West raised their two sons and have their studios in adjoining barn buildings. They moved to Wales in the mid-1980s after her mother moved to a smallholding just 11 miles from where they settled.

“My mother said she’d found this beautiful place that would be great for the kids – it was quite an impulsive thing. We’d just done up a ruin in east london, which we got for a song. We sold it and bought this place, really for the children – they needed the space.”

Over the years her home, and her second home in France, have inspired much of her work – rich, theatrical interiors which also speak of her parent’s background in the theatre. Pursuing this theme, she made a series of paintings about theatre costume, which also explore female identity – “the idea that women are destined to constrict themselves in costume.”

The Inner room, inspired by her stepfather’s set designs, is a case in point – another painting, Madame Bovary, depicts a woman confined in a domestic interior against arsenic-green wallpaper, her fine dress a reflection of the clothing obsession that drives her to financial ruin.

Her style reflects the influence of painters ranging from rembrandt, Toulouse-lautrec and Van Gough to Soutine and Francis Bacon, but also

It’s not just decoration. It’s not just a sweet painting – it’s to do with some kind of empathy or emotion. I usually paint when I’m kind of affected by something

exhibiting while also teaching for a time – her story is one of steady work and a gradual rise to prominence, during which she has gained a string of awards, including a gold medal in the National Eisteddfod in 1992, the BBC Wales Visual Art Award in 1994 and the 2003 Jerwood Painting Prize.

She sings the praises of Wales’ public arts spaces, which have enabled her to embrace painting on a large scale – something that is very much reflected by the size of the pieces in her birthday show.

“It was through the opportunity of having these big exhibitions at Aberystwyth Art Centre, Moston, Oriel Davies and the National Library of Wales – all wonderful spaces – and my work came out of that kind of opportunity to exhibit in these public spaces, which I don’t think you’d have in London unless you’re a Damien Hirst or a Tracy Emin. It certainly raised my game. I’ve been amazingly supported by the Welsh art scene.”

She’s also had the chance to experiment – for example, by making automata or simply “going against the grain in terms of what was trendy. I could do great big paintings, I could experiment, I felt that sense of freedom and I felt that you also were noticed – you weren’t neglected.”

Her birthday show reflects not only her journey to date but also the creative flame that continues to burn bright, turning the personal into the universal: “I want to emotionally touch people, without being sentimental, but to have the direct emotional response that you get from music or from a performance in the theatre,” she says.

“It’s not just decoration. It’s not just a sweet painting – it’s to do with some kind of empathy or emotion. I usually paint when I’m kind of affected by something, like my mother having a stroke or being a mother – everything that affects me emotionally, I try to paint about it.”

■ Shani At 70 is at Connaught Brown in London from April 19 until May 19. More details at www.connaughtbrown.co.uk