Artists Biography

As a child, I passed through Cape Town after spending 3 years on the remote and peaceful island of Tristan da Cunha. What I encountered was a bewildering world of visually perplexing experiences - new sizes, shapes, speeds, colours and juxtapositions all around, and I found it entirely surprising.

Perhaps as much as anything, that uncertain visual world underlies my paintings - most artists would claim an interest in the relationships between space and form, but in my case it veers toward what is real and what is not; what can be trusted and what might prove illusory.

Having trained at Chelsea School of Art in the 1960s my career has combined
teaching Art and Design and painting. Now based in Edinburgh I combine my
own work with studying Art Psychotherapy, and also teaching children in the
slums of Nairobi for the charity Anno's Africa

(Francesca Wilkinson Shaw 2010).