Andrea Shields

Ms. Shields attended the University of Oregon at Eugene, majoring in philosophy and psychology. Nevertheless, she established herself in the then energetic art community in Eugene and continued to work in many artistic media: oils, watercolors, metal sculptures, and mixed media.

In the early 1970s, Ms. Shields came to central Illinois for graduate study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since then, except for spending four years in North Carolina, where her husband was serving as an artist-in-residence, she has made Champaign her home.

Though she has not worked in metal since arriving in Illinois, she has continued to produce and exhibit paintings and mixed media pieces, while at the same time working professionally in other fields. For several years, Ms. Shields has worked with international students as the Executive Director of an international student organization.

Her studies and work in philosophy, psychology, music, religion, yoga, and related fields, as well as the beauty of the old San Francisco neighborhoods and of the ocean and hills of the surrounding northern California countryside which were her visual inspiration during her formative years, have had a profound effect on her art. These influences have fostered a style that gently fuses the concrete and the abstract, that speaks of the natural world and also of something magical within that world.

During the 1990s, Ms. Shields has worked predominantly in watercolor. Some of these paintings are mixed media in that they combine collage with watercolor or add some other material, such as paper-thin strips of wood or Mexican silver milagros, to the painting. The pictures are not built up in the typical watercolor technique that uses thin washes of paint to create a somewhat transparent effect. Rather, she applies her paint more heavily, often with a palette knife, producing an image that may at first appear to be a picture done in oil.

Thus, her paintings range from those of flat texture to works in which a deep texture is produced by overlayed paper and thickly applied paint. In color, they range from near monochromatic works whose emotional effects are created by line and by subtle variations of tone, to pictures whose surfaces dance with vivid colors. Even in these latter pictures, however, subtle effects are created by the juxtaposition of large areas of color with areas of detail and areas of bold contrast with areas of gentle gradations of hue.

Ms. Shields’ paintings stand between the abstract and the figurative. In her works, figures and forms and personages are evoked out of backgrounds. They confront us or console us, perhaps making us aware of the figures that emerge from the backgrounds of our own consciousness.