Sheila El-Hassani studied at Leeds College of Art in the 1950s where she specialised in Graphic Art, obtaining the National Diploma in Design (First Class Hons.) and the ATC (Accred. Teaching Cert.) from the University of Leeds in 1955. She then entered the teaching profession, first in England and later in Iraq, where she travelled extensively with her husband, Mahdi, who was working for the United Nations at that time.
It was while she was living in Iraq that she began to further her interest in drawing and painting; both personally, through sketching the everyday lives of people, and also through professional practice, producing freelance graphic design work for the Iraqi Ministry for Education and also for Iraqi Industries. Sheila would sketch on location in the streets, in the souks and around the mosques, drawing individuals and groups of people amid the social landscape of everyday life in Baghdad in the 1960s.
In 1970 Sheila returned to settle in her native Yorkshire with her family and to continue her career as an educator. After her retirement she developed a vast body of artworks: drawings, gouache paintings and pen & ink wash images of the stall traders, the environment and the public as they went about their everyday business in Leeds City (Kirkgate) Market. Many of the stalls and shops that Sheila has sketched and painted through the years have since ‘gone’ and become the stuff of memories, but her paintings and drawings are alive with the characters and stallholders who inhabited them.
Sheila has exhibited her paintings and drawings locally and nationally over many decades, and notably, her artworks were selected for inclusion in the Leeds City Art Gallery Open Exhibition for ten consecutive years, from 2000 – 2010.
Sheila and Mahdi have visited Turkey many times, and Morocco too, in the decades after their return to the UK enabling Sheila to continue her love of drawing and painting in different city spaces.
She says “I have visited Antalya in Turkey on many occasions and enjoyed walking around and drawing people as they went about their activities. Prayer is a part of public, everyday life in the city and over the years I have produced hundreds of drawings of people as they prayed, shopped and worked there. The man shown in my painting titled ‘Submission’ first took figurative form as one of many sketches that I made on a visit to the Murat Paşa mosque”.
The drawings that Sheila creates could be described as ‘lines in motion’ for she draws people as they move and go about their everyday business, recording those moments when perhaps “someone puts a rucksack on their shoulder, selects a product to purchase, or turns to chat with a companion (and so on).” They are produced so rapidly that they often consist of incomplete figurative images – traces of momentary perceptions and movements that link Sheila, with the space which she inhabits and shares with others. These artworks are not seeking to glorify the act of drawing, they communicate a transient, aesthetic connection with an absolutely unique, indexical moment in space and time, while simultaneously raising issues relevant to class, culture and the delineation of city spaces.
Sheila translates and reconfigures selected drawings into gouache paintings in a process that involves lengthy periods of reflective consideration and critical deliberation. At times she works directly from sketches and at other times she creates and composes her own imaginative, aesthetic mise en scenes, incorporating character groups from particular places into her work. Sheila’s paintings are based upon her experiential encounters with people and places and are founded on the many sketches and drawings she has made in locations such as market stalls and shops, city arcades, mosques, village squares, market buildings, bus stops, bus stations and train stations, in Morocco, Turkey and Leeds.
Now aged 91 years and living with Parkinson’s Disease, Sheila is unable to draw or practice en plein air as she once did, although she enjoys making ink and brush wash sketches of people around her.
Statement written by Sheila’s Daughter, Dr Suzanne Wilks.
