Photo: Rocio Segura

Sheila Lanham started out as a poet in Baltimore, and quickly gravitated towards painting once she relocated to NYC. She studied at the School of Visual Arts, and then as a Painting Major at The Maryland Institute College of Art. She worked for years as a studio assistant or archivist in the studios of artists Arman, Jane Frielicher, Karel Appel, poet Kenneth Koch, and others. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York and Baltimore. She was a 2020 recipient of an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant.
_______________________________________________________________________

My paintings consist of an ongoing interest in our culture of accumulation, and manifests itself through the stacking of forms. 


With the current Colossal series, I begin with mark-making from top to bottom, one color at a time. By starting this way, the accumulation is spontaneously skeletal. Eventually, I render it into a cohesive structured form, surprisingly full of illusions wrought from randomness. I am not thinking about a figure or a 'head', rather an accumulation of fragments. The eventual form is unknown to me, other than I want it to be seemingly larger than life. The Colossal series evolved from the the Cairn series, once I lifted the formations up onto a platform, and added a horizon line, they reminded me of ancient Olmec Colossal heads, and that concept of "larger-than-life appealed to me as yet another reflection of our current culture. 


The 2024--25 Cairn series was inspired by my frequent visits to Maya archaeological sites in Mexico over 20 years. I then researched rock stacking in the form of cairns and monolithic stones in central England, where my ancestors may have accumulated stones as far back as the 11th century. I asked myself, what would my primal accumulation of stones look like? That turned out to be the stacked simple forms from my memory that exist in both the the Cairn and Colossal series.


In the 2023-24 Profiles series, I began stacking preliminary sketches and transferring the resulting image to canvas. The resulting abstract forms were then transformed through image association into objects and figures, to create a centralized accumulated form. Once I titled this series, they came to represent the way we have been reduced to "profiles" by the online media categorization: a heap of human aspects stacked neatly into one form.


In the 2020-22 World View series, collages were made from fragments of landscape photographs and assembled into totemic stacks, and then made into oil paintings. 


An main theme in early works was the reorganization of landscape space. Those paintings consisted of minimal compositions with stacked multiple horizons, illusory light sources, and patterning found in landscapes. The current accumulations have evolved from those early stacked compositions. 


Like a list poem, my paintings may contain seemingly unrelated thoughts (or in this case, forms) that piece together to create one concept (or image in this case).