Stuart Shils

“Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, everything appears to have been stripped of its earthly presence and looks like a foggy apparition hovering in space. Then I put on my glasses. In those intervening moments – when all I can make out is that there‘s an object over there which fills this much space – I feel like I‘m living in one of Stuart Shils‘ tiny, precisely made paintings. By “precise“, I don‘t mean that Shils delineates every shingle on a house in the distance. Rather, that he makes the color of that house sit exactly where it want to in pictorial space….But the real beauty of Shils‘ painting lies in his transformation of the ordinary landscapes into tonal poems which never seem to get tripped up by the awkward machinery of paint….. (His) paint sits in space like shimmering blobs of reflected light, and, to me, that moment of confusion between paint and light is the most beautiful thing you‘ll see on any given day. With or without your glasses.“
Gerard Brown / Philadelphia Weekly

  “Mr. Shils‘s landscapes dwell on the uncertain border between representation and abstraction: increasingly, they cross into pure suggestion. Landscape is inseparable from scenery, yet scenes all but dissolve, Turner like, in these modestly scaled oils. In their place is something much more elusive, harder to evoke: the mood of a locale and the temper of its weather.“
Maureen Mullarkey / The New York Sun

“And as this dialogue unfolds over the weeks of working here, each day the hand and the brush feel freer to push a bit more – to maybe bully the landscape (the concrete place of “objective form“, “out there“)… and to take certain liberties that only come with the confidence of this digging. And the painting - in terms of connecting with its formal destiny, with its evolving abstraction, an image emerging in pigment that does not exist beyond the work surface - becomes the primary focus and can now, slowly, tell me what it wants to be. Sure, the ephemeral forms of nature bathed in transient light are very real presences, but I‘m reminded, that what these paintings are “about“ is an interiorized response to that fact - in other words, not what was seen but how it was seen.“
From a letter written to a friend while working on the Irish coast, summer 2004