Pavel 2019 (Head Study) Painting

Winner of The Threadneedle Prize, and 2019 winner of the London and the South East Regional Prize at ING Discerning Eye Exhibition. Sheila Wallis brings the skills of a traditional figurative painter to bear on a wide spectrum of contemporary and historical subject matter. Cinematic film stills, photojournalism, boxing bouts, post mortem daguerreotypes and Victorian asylum photographs have all inspired a meticulous critique of lens-based imagery, inviting reconsideration of the public and the private, fiction and fact, the dispassionate lens and the hand of the painter. Drawing on her experience of growing up catholic in Derry City in the north of Ireland during the height of the Troubles, Wallis’ work insinuates political awareness and redemptive creative transformation in equal measure. Sheila Wallis has also won the Winsor and Newton Painting Prize, the Watts Painting Prize and In 2014 was awarded the City and Guilds of London MA Fine Art Principal’s Prize. Sheila lives with her husband in London, and works from her South London studio