‘At last I wasn’t worried about making pictures’: an interview with Mark Shields

Mark Shields is a painter of considerable versatility and skill who is unable to rest on his laurels. Born in 1963 in Northern Ireland, where he still lives, he developed a powerful realist style that owes much to the Old Masters, and scored early success with meticulous portraits and still-life paintings. If he had been happy to continue in that vein, he would no doubt have made a very good, if safe, living, but ambition and self-questioning have led him on to develop new ways of painting and drawing, from mysterious, atmospheric landscapes and complex narrative pictures to large-scale pastel drawings on canvas. Shields speaks of a dread of falling into rhythms of working that lead inexorably to unthinking habit, and continually experiments with materials in an effort to insure against this. His latest work signals yet another departure: a series of 99 paintings of mostly single figures in oil on muslin, each measuring some 5ft by 2ft.