Stella Shakerchi Exhibition

Elliot Gallery

Creative people are fascinating. Nevertheless, just why and how artists arrive at whatever they do is often a mystery, especially with abstract art. The underlying motivation for their decisions may remain a secret, not just to the viewing public but possibly even to the artists themselves. This is especially true of those artists who see themselves as conduits of forces beyond consciousness.

However, this does not appear to hold true for Stella Shakerchi's recent paintings. In her current exhibition at the Elliott Gallery of the Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation in Devonshire, supporting documentation accompanying many of her paintings provides a useful guide to understanding the creative process underlying the painting's design. Although Stella Shakerchi confesses to a lifelong passion for visual arts, her emphasis in education was primarily in literary arts, especially Shakespeare and Renaissance and Mediaeval literature.

Her personal background, however, is a multi-national one, with roots in the Islamic world, as well as England, where she studied at Oxford and the Universities of Birmingham and Wales.

Over the last two years that I have known Stella Shakerchi's paintings, it is apparent that she has been exploring various stylistic avenues, including realism, in addition to abstraction, however, she is at her best with her abstracts.

Although her abstracts are stylistically similar, there is an ongoing development. In saying this, I do not mean that they are getting progressively better, although they most likely are. What I mean is that there are ongoing, subtle changes, from one painting to another and it seems obvious that she is using this very personal style as an avenue to investigate various art elements, in addition to using paintings to express her own thoughts and interests.

Something of Ms Shakerchi's diverse interests and background underly many of her paintings, example of which may be seen in three paintings in the show that represent three major religions: Hinduism, Islam and Judaism.

Intertwined within her less than rigid geometry are subtle symbols of each religion. The painting representing Hinduism uses a form that recalls the Lotus flower, an important symbol within that religion. Arabic intertwines itself through the painting representing Islam, while a Kabbalistic diagram, that mystical branch of Judaism, intermingles within the meandering lines that make-up the rest of the composition.

There is also a group of paintings in this show that are inspired by certain literary works. I noted such writers as WB Yeats and John Donne, but the one that I consider her most successful is a rather colourful work based upon the lyrics of the American Pop musician, Anton Barbeau. There are two such works in the show, but the one that caught my eye is called 'The Apple Sun'. The poem is rather surreal and the painting somewhat psychedelic; the words and image seem to belong together.

This is possibly true of the other paintings inspired by literature, but the connection is not so clearcut. With the Barbeau, however, the words are visually descriptive and therefore lend themselves to this visual project in a more obvious manner.

An important aspect of Ms. Shakerchi's paintings is colour; however, her use of colour is not, for the most part, notably bright or in any way garish. Colours within each painting are carefully chosen and often, quite intuitively it seems, she uses colour cords that play upon the colour wheel. With the Hindu painting, for example, she employs various tones of violet, a colour often associated with the lotus flower.

The exhibition continues through February 18, 2008