NZ Painter – Stephanie Sheehan

Brief profile of New Zealand painter, Stephanie Sheehan, who counts among her greatest influences, Yvonne Rust, Tony Fomison and Philip Clairemont

Stephanie Sheehan is feisty enough to make you want to pick your words around her, and she doesn’t mince her own. Her paintings express some of that same quality.

Challenging Works

Usually frameless and often in unexpected shapes; triangles, diamonds, ovals, mandalas, this work is not chocolate-box pretty. Many challenge societal memes, juxtaposing them with true ideals, and these are reflected in the adjacent placement of sometimes shocking colours. Other works display simply masterful harmonies of hue. Thin layers of oil paint building up to thick chunks and lumps provide surprising nuance not available to a cursory viewer.

Much of this work has a relentless disquiet about it. The more challenging pieces require the viewer’s full presence to really ‘see’ them. One critic commented in 1990 that Sheehan’s skills as a representational artist weren’t in doubt (a fabulous schnapper’s head entered one corner of a painting), though most of the work was not so obvious. It tended towards visual double-takes, puns, and subtleties.

Painting Influences

Born in 1949, Stephanie Sheehan was raised in Kaiapoi near Christchurch. Her first pair of glasses came at age seven when suddenly the leaves on trees became apparent. In 1964 Yvonne Rust took over the position of art mistress at Papanui High. Slightly terrifying, Rust always listened intently to her charges, a new experience for most of them. She had taught art for almost twenty years and had an innate eye for talent. She also opened doors where she could for the gifted.

For Sheehan, meeting Yvonne Rust was a pivotal event. Never one to muck about, she persuaded Sheehan’s parents that their daughter had talent, and that it should be expressed. Grudgingly, they allowed her to take art, and under Rust’s warm wing, Sheehan was able to explore and develop. Her voice was redirected through a paint brush and freedom of speech, one of her enduring themes, found an appropriate outlet.

‘Yvonne wouldn’t dictate subject matter but she would dictate that you put effort into your work. It was obvious to her whether a teenager was sincere in their work.’

Rust’s credo was to be true to one’s self and to express that truth. Sheehan continues to champion that creed today. ‘Being true to yourself is not being a fraud. It’s being real, who you deeply are.’

In 1965, Rust, doing battle with teachers and parents alike, organised a place for Sheehan at a Summer Art School where she learnt life drawing, painting, and attitude from Pat Hanly. The school excluded minors but Rust got around it somehow and then convinced Sheehan’s parents to allow their fifteen year old daughter to travel unchaperoned on the Lyttleton ferry to Wellington and by train to Auckland. That year Sheehan contributed an oil painting to the Scondary Schools Art Exhibition. Rust had bought her the paints, her first.

After she finished art school under tutors Rudi Gopas and Bill Sutton, with an Honours degree in painting in 1974, Sheehan moved to Tai Tokerau Northland to live near her mentor who encouraged her to paint because that was what she really wanted to do.

Passing the Skills On

A respected painting tutor, Sheehan says there are standard things you teach people to do in terms of manipulating pigment. ‘You have to do it with your hand, have it come from your heart, and be directed by your brain. It’s just a little bit of fluff on the end of a bit of wood that you dabble around in the pigment. To get it to do what you want it to do is another matter entirely. I try to teach people to work in co-operation with the paint.’

‘It’s the impulse, the inspiration, the vision, the trying, the drive to do it, that matters, not the resulting object,’ she says.

Always a painter, Sheehan has also worked as a casual tutor, lecturing and taking workshops at NorthTec. She has worked as an arts reviewer and arts book reviewer, as well as regularly tutoring at the Quarry Arts Centre annual Summer Do in Whangarei.

She was winner of the Special Prize Royal Overseas League Show in London in 1974, and took first prize in 1993 at the Kaitaia Arts Festival. A recipient of QEII ARCONZ grants in 1975, 1976 and 1984, Sheehan also took up a short term residency at the Rita Angus cottage in Wellington in 1994.

 

Stephanie Sheehan lives and paints in Christchurch.

Source: Theresa Sjoquist interview with Stephanie Sheehan

©Theresa Sjoquist