Mt. Airy artist Stuart Shils will open a conversation about light, nature and art on Thursday, Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m., at the Skyspace art installation at the Chestnut Hill Quaker Meeting, 20 East Mermaid Lane. (Photo by Barbara Sherf)

by Barbara Sherf

Lifelong area resident and abstract artist Stuart Shils, 62, was introduced to light and nature as a toddler as his mother, a longtime Philadelphia schoolteacher, and father, an insurance salesman, would take him and his sister to the Wissahickon Valley for nature walks.

“The whole area of Chestnut Hill had a great influence on me, between the light streaming through the trees in the Wissahickon to the George Woodward houses to my early birthday parties in Pastorius Park,” Shils reminisced last week.

“We grew up in an ordinary row house in Mt. Airy near Ivy Hill Road, so living near Chestnut Hill was a visual gift in a way that deeply informed the development of looking at our physical and light-drenched world.”

Shils' family moved to Springfield Township when he was 16. A Springfield High School Class of ’72 graduate, he took his Bar Mitzvah money and spent a summer hitchhiking through England, France and Israel. He opened exhibitions in Israel, Ireland and other European countries before settling back in Mt. Airy a decade ago.

“And there in those countries I was blown away by the presence of antiquity. We had industrial ruins here in Philly, which also had a profound impact on my sense of form while frequently riding the Chestnut Hill Local (train) into town, but we don’t have ruins like one finds in Europe, and this fed my imagination greatly.”  

After dropping out of architecture school, Shils spent a summer working at a factory in North Philadelphia and over the summer started taking courses at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts).

“And in that summer of ’74, the hook was sunk. Doris Staffel (who died in 2013) was my painting teacher, and she ripped aside the veil,” said Shils. “She was one of the great teachers, and I fell in love with painting. From there I went on to what was then called the Academy, or the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.”

In a 2012 show at Woodmere Art Museum, Shils wrote in the program about his former teacher: “How curious to me now that it was not her work that pulled me in then. I had no idea what her paintings looked like. She never showed them to us, and it was long before the advent of the Internet. But her devotion as a teacher hit me very hard…

“Last summer on the balcony of Woodmere, I saw a ravishing piece from the permanent collection, 'Gateless Gate' (1987), a grey and black abstract painting on paper that knocked my socks off, as if it were speaking directly to me in a language that I now knew how to read and care about. It is so beautiful.”

Shils had a 2001 solo show at Woodmere and exhibited his work widely here and in New York City. He is an admitted Skyspace devotee (the James Turrell Skyspace housed in the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting), visiting often and bringing his students.

His way of looking at art changed in the early ‘90s, when the owners of the Dolan/Maxwell Gallery opened a residency program in Ireland on the Northwest coast of County Mayo, where Shils then spent 13 summers, some of which is seen in a PBS documentary, “Ballycastle.”

At first, when the stormy weather came in, he would pack up his materials and wait for the rain to clear, but eventually he stood in the rain and would paint rain. “It changed my whole life. In ‘98 and ’99 I was examining the colors of rain, and that took me into an entirely different appreciation of light than that which I had acquired working in Philly.”

Shils will speak about “The Voice of Color” on Thursday, Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m., at the James Turrell Skyspace in the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting. He will speak about the meaning of art socially and related topics. The program is free, but for those who can afford it, a $10 donation at the door will go to the “Greet the Light” endowment fund for Skyspace repairs.

For more information, visit https://savvypainter.com/podcast/stuart-shils/ or www.chestnuthillskyspace.org. Barbara Sherf can be reached at barb@communicationspro.com.