Rolf on Shani Rhys James
Post categories: Rolf on Welsh Art,ÌýVisual arts
| 10:30 UK time, Wednesday, 2 March 2011
I loved Shani's paintings. They very much had their own style and they're all similar and all recognisably hers.
Her paintings have very staring, very hypnotic eyes. You can't look away from the self portraits, you find you are mesmerised and grabbed by those eyes looking right through you. And the skin colour, the reddish nature of the skin colour, felt to me as if she'd always painted herself almost sunburnt by the Australian climate that she had moved away from when she was nine. She always has that Australianness in everything she's done, I think.
Overall, Shani Rhys James. (Property of 91Èȱ¬ Wales)
When Shani's painting her self-portraits, she looks at her mirror image through a tiny hand mirror and paints things from really up close, and I found that was very confusing for me when I came to try to do my version of it. I did it without my glasses on so that I wouldn't have really crystal clear vision - I thought I'd be able to see myself slightly blurry, up close. But I couldn't get any sense out of looking in the small mirror at all. I just found it really awkward and depressing when I first did it. I eventually came back and re-did the hair shape and made it look a bit more like me, but I was hampered by the fact that I found it very difficult to move away from my normal impressionistic self portraits.
It was the least satisfactory style of all of them for me, although the end result looks sort of okay. However, it's not as good as I would have liked it to have been. I'm fascinated by what Shani does - I just found I couldn't do it well enough to please me!
Rolf was in conversation with the 91Èȱ¬ Cymru Wales press office.
Watch the third episode of Rolf on Welsh Art on Wednesday at 7.30pm on 91Èȱ¬ One Wales, or catch up afterwards on 91Èȱ¬ iPlayer.
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