Shazia

Shazia’s first painting was a piece for her infant son’s nursery entitled ‘Anna and Guto’. She wanted a child to be able to appreciate the image so created an uncomplicated and simple design which set the tone for her portrait pieces to date. A Letter To My Younger Self continues this theme with vibrant limited-edition portraits of children, whose colours pop from Shazia’s trademark dark backgrounds, influenced by Renaissance art.

Shazia’s portraits of children are indicative of how she paints by instinct and isn’t afraid to deviate from her original ideas. “Sometimes I know which direction I'm going and then all of a sudden, I just swerve out of nowhere and then it goes off to something else,” she explains. “I cannot for sure explain the elements I paint but during the process of painting I allow things to naturally emerge and before I am aware of this the paint is already set and dry and I am left wondering why and how those elements made it onto the canvas. It is only then I am able to decipher and accept their meaning.

“Images just come naturally to me, I just think back about the people I knew, but they are also people I know now. It's little things that I pick up on. Once I'm in the studio, I have to close the doors A weird little foible I know but I’ve done this since I was a child. I think it might be something to do with having imaginary friends as a child so our clandestine meets happened behind closed doors. My friends have long gone but the closing of doors has become a ritual. I just paint until my alarm goes off to do the school run. Then we have some family time and after that I'm back in the studio.”

Shazia has a gift for creating children with immense character, and part of that gift is storytelling and creating real personality in her work. “I did start painting them to tell their story, but the piece becomes the story of the person who buys the artwork,” she says. “Funnily enough, the first painting I ever sold was to a man in his fifties who said it reminded him of himself when he was a child”.

“I had an amazing childhood and so I draw inspiration from that. Mine was a world where a retired Diana Dors lived up the street where the powder blue Austin was parked outside. Eleanor Rigby lived in the house with the moss green door, never came out of her home except Sunday mornings. Bruce Foxton hurried down the street in his suit, clacking his heels across the cobbles every weekend. I thought Miss Marple lived with her sister at No 5 and I thought the world ended at the top of the hill where the school stood casting its long shadow over my imagined little world. I remembered my first day at school. I had turned 5 and started school on a cold January morning. My first day I was led by the hand by a girl with thick, fiery-red hair and the night sky all over her face. I think I pinched her to make sure she was real. She was there for a couple of weeks before she stopped turning up to school. You will see her in many of my paintings.”

Each painting has a name, but Shazia says these can be fluid. “I could be painting a Derek, but in the process of painting, he could become a Damien. I think if I started off with sketches of the children, that would restrict me. So I just let things flow freely because that helps me it get me to the point I need to get to”.

Shazia makes her own egg tempera, a medium that has been favoured by artists for centuries. Egg tempera is renowned for its durability, beautiful luminosity, and glowing quality, offering numerous advantages to artists willing to tackle the challenges of this ancient medium to capture ethereal scenes. A preferred medium for centuries, many medieval and Renaissance masterpieces found in museums and art galleries use thus method.

Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium made from pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder, usually a glutinous substance like egg yolk. The term "tempera" also refers to the paintings created with this medium. Tempera paintings are incredibly long-lasting, with examples dating back to the first century AD still in existence.

For many centuries, egg tempera was the preferred medium for panel paintings, and numerous medieval and Renaissance masterpieces were created using this method. Egg tempera is more durable than oil and offers a luminosity akin to watercolour. It is more transparent than oil and holds less pigment, allowing light to penetrate through it and reflect off the white surface of the primer beneath it. Unlike oil paint, egg tempera is resistant to light, and its colours do not darken or change with age.

“I definitely think there's a Renaissance influence in my work, with the dark background like Dutch paintings,” Shazia explains. “I use the old method of using egg tempera in the beginning and then layering the paint on slowly”. The first of the paintings of children she made was to hang in her son’s nursery school, of two of his fellow pupils Anna and Guto, and she tried to keep things simple. “Because it was for a child, I wanted children to understand so I tried to make things uncomplicated and really simple”.

Shazia’s post-university adventures in South America still remain an influence in her art. “I kept a travel diary; when we were in places like Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia, you weren't allowed to take photographs of people, as they thought that every time you took a photograph of someone, you'd steal their soul, so we were always really careful. So I used to sketch quite a bit”.

Shazia had a great imagination as a child, which has also fed her art. “I had an amazing childhood and so I drew inspiration from that.” One of the features in Shazia’s work is that her subjects don’t have a mouth, and when asked about this, she recalls: “When I was a child I was unable to speak because of a little stutter which was ridiculed endlessly - it wounded me deeply and so I tried to say as little as possible. “I lived in an imagined world where you didn’t need to say much but if you listened or watched with your beady eyes you could still communicate with others. I thought I had special telepathic powers like in the TV show Sapphire and Steel.