It’s all about the light, they say. From Thomas Moran to Jackson Pollock, countless creatives have called the East End home. Included in that number is Sheila Eaton Isham (1924-2024), a globe-trotting painter, poet, and printmaker.
In a short 1989 film from the LTV Archive, “An Artist’s Odyssey,” Isham shared some of her philosophies, practices, and inspiration. Like many artists before her, she cites the quality of light on eastern Long Island as one of the many reasons she chose to make Sagaponack her permanent home in 1987.
Before moving here in the late 1980s, Isham was a world traveler. At various times she lived in Germany, China, Russia, and Haiti, just to name a few. Her world-traveling lifestyle was clearly influenced by her marriage to Ambassador Heyward Isham (1926-2009) in 1950. She accompanied Heyward to his many Foreign Service posts over the next 30 years. In each new place, Isham would take inspiration from the culture around her, and those influences can be clearly seen in her works.
In this brief video profile of Isham, she describes some of her daily artistic routines, giving viewers insight into her techniques, which involve airbrushing, applying pigment with her hands, and using textiles to create texture. She also describes her morning routine of painting flowers to get in the right mind-set, after which she is seen working on larger pieces.
To Isham, art was in some ways the ultimate combination of the physical and the spiritual. Spirituality was an important part of her life and art, as she said in a 1978 interview in The East Hampton Star: “My life has always been spiritually oriented. Painting is a manifestation of it.”
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Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the Long Island Collection.
