Unusually for a painter, Tony Shiels’s best known work may (or may not) have been a piece of sculpture. In May 1977, Shiels, who has died at 86, was standing below Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands when a creature appeared in the water. It was, Shiels said, glossy and muscular. He managed to take two colour photographs of it, the clearest pictures of the Loch Ness monster then available.
The world of Nessology erupted. But excitement gave way to annoyance when Shiels hinted that the shot had been staged, using a Plasticine model he had made. The subject of his photos was now dubbed “the Loch Ness muppet”. That Shiels later recanted his recantation cut no ice. Monster-spotters had a sense of having been toyed with.
Shiels was unrepentant. He was an artist, and the role of the artist was to bring pleasure. This he had undoubtedly done. A Plasticine monster was no more fake than a painting: hoaxing was in the eye of the beholder. Seen in this way, Shiels’s work was a piece of performance art.
His early training, though, was as a painter. Born in Salford, to Thomas, a bookmaker, and Jean, a schoolteacher, he was brought up in the Lancashire coastal town of Lytham St Annes, where his parents ran a hotel – they later moved to Cornwall and ran a restaurant in Porthtowan. In 1951, his parents took him to visit the Festival of Britain in London, where he saw his first Picassos.
In 1954, he was allowed to go to the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and, while there, to the Académie André Lhote in Paris. In 1958, after avoiding national service by briefly studying at the Blackpool School of Art, Shiels moved to Carbis Bay near St Ives. In the same year, he married Christine Price.
St Ives was then the hub of English avant-garde painting, although that, for Shiels, was not its attraction. “I’ve never been much of a one for art colonies really,” he said, in an interview with the online journal artcornwall. “I can’t stand that shite, honestly.”
Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth “regarded themselves as the town’s bosses”. Shiels instead befriended his neighbour, the painter Peter Lanyon, a fellow member of the Penwith Society of Arts. “Peter thought they should allow anything into the Penwith as long as it seemed real,” Shiels recalled. This included his own paintings, executed in a style that he dubbed “surrealchemy”.
After a drunken incident involving guns lent to him by Terry Frost, in the 1960s Shiels and his family left St Ives for Ponsanooth near Falmouth. By then, he had already begun to paint the works he called Sea Heads, a series that would occupy him for the next 60 years.
Often depicting what looked like fish, these combined strong, gestural brushwork with a vivid palette. “They have Cubist roots in circles and straight lines,” Shiels said of the works. “Once I had done a few of them, I decided to do a few more, and for the rest of my life.”
In the tradition of the local artist Alfred Wallis, the Sea Heads were painted on anything that came to hand. In Piratical Sea Head (2016), the legend “Guinness: Made of More” shows through the surface. An exhibition of his work called Beer Mat Matters, in Penzance in 2020, featured small-scale works painted on pub coasters.
The Sea Heads also called to mind Shiels’ parallel life as a stage magician. As a child, he had been taken by his father to the Blackpool Palace theatre, to see the magicians Dante and Gali Gali. Between 1970 and 1974, he performed at Cornish festivals as Tony “Doc” Shiels, Wizard of the West. In the year before his escapades at Loch Ness, he attempted to raise Morgawr, the Cornish sea monster, with the help of a coven of witches.
Whether you believed in Shiels’ magic was neither here nor there. He remained, at heart, a Surrealist, his showmanship akin to that of Salvador Dalí, his necromantic beard a variant of Dalí’s waxed moustache. This was not understood by his Cornish neighbour, the painter and occultist Ithell Colquhoun. “I told her that I was a charlatan and she denied it,” Shiels cheerily recalled. “‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You have real powers’, and all that nonsense. I said ‘no more than anyone else, my dear’.”
All this overshadowed his importance as a painter. Shiels had arrived in Cornwall a fully fledged French abstractionist. By 1963, he had reintroduced the figure to his work in canvases such as Four Frightened Bathers. Artists including Roger Hilton took note, and followed suit. Shiels’ influence was acknowledged in an exhibition called Creative Tensions, held in Penzance in 2019 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Penwith Society.
In the 1990s, he moved to the west of Ireland.
Christine died in 2022. He is survived by their sons, Gareth and Ewan, and daughters, Kate, Meg and Lucy.
• Anthony Nicol Shiels, artist and magician, born 25 May 1938; died 11 July 2024
