Sheila Lanham started out as a poet in Baltimore, and quickly gravitated towards painting. She studied at the School of Visual Arts, and then as a Painting Major at The Maryland Institute College of Art. She worked for years as a studio assistant or archivist in the studios of artists Arman, Jane Frielicher, Karel Appel, poet Kenneth Koch, and others. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York and Baltimore. She was a 2020 recipient of an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant.

My paintings consist of an ongoing interest in our culture of accumulations. Previously, in my World View series, collages were made from fragments of landscape photographs and assembled into monumental stacks, and then made into oil paintings. In the next series, Profiles, I began stacking preliminary sketches. The resulting abstract forms were then transformed through image association into objects and figures, to create a colossal, centralized, accumulated form.


The Cairn series, my most recent body of work, is inspired by rock formations known as cairns and also by monolithic rock accumulations. Unable to stop the inevitable reference to the human figure, no matter how hard I try, the accumulations of rock forms, as well as the other two series above, often contain references to the figure. I had started out as a figurative painter.


An main theme in previous works has been the reorganization of landscape space. Those paintings consisted of minimal compositions with stacked multiple horizons, centralized spatial concepts, illusory light sources, and patterning found in the landscapes. The  current totemic accumulations have evolved from those early stacked compositions. I have settled into a phase of stacked images and accumulated forms.


I like to think of the accumulations as being similar to a list poem, where seemingly unrelated fragments, forms, patterns or images ultimately create one idea, or in this case, a cohesive form.