Shirley Maher is an artist and illustrator whose work moves between imagination and reality, where colors reflect hidden thoughts and feelings. She began her studies at All Saints College (Middlesex University), later learning printmaking with Terry Shave and painting with John Epstein at Morley College. She received a Diploma in Art and Design from Southwark College and spent a year at Camberwell School of Art, studying life drawing with Ben Levine and painting with Frances Hoyland.
She is a member of the Oxford Printmakers Co-operative and the Summertown Art Group, and the Hesketh Hubbard Life Drawing Society, and has exhibited at Oxford Artweek, with the Abstract Artists Group in London, and in solo shows. Working across different media, from oil and watercolor painting to lithographs and monoprints, Maher often lets her prints inspire new paintings. Her art grows from both personal experience and the natural world, giving her work a vivid and living rhythm.

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Statement

“Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible,” Paul KleePaul Klee argued, and Shirley Maher’s work takes that as method: an aesthetic-philosophical practice where tidal horizons, bold color fields, and spare, searching lines turn lived sensation into form. From seascapes whose shifting bands of blue and green resolve into abstract rhythm to quick life studies and portraits in urgent charcoal, her images read as signs of perception rather than description, ultimately fusing the figurative and the abstract into a lucid, humane language of seeing.

Gallery

Sea
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Bonfire
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Life drawing
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Others
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Contact

info@shirleymaher.com