The Artist

I come from a family of artists, starting with my grandmother, Jean Beeton. I feel that I absorbed my love for art through osmosis. Through spending time with her and my mother in their studios as a young child. During COVID lockdown, I rediscovered this passion for art.

My work is mostly abstract, and it comes from an interest in the psyche. I’m drawn to the processes that move beneath conscious awareness, the half-formed feelings, tensions and shifts that rise from the unconscious before we have words for them. Abstraction lets me work with these without explaining them away. Now and then a piece lets in something recognisable from the real world, like a landmark or symbol.

I hope the work does two things at once. I’d like it to bring a sense of harmony to the spaces it lives in, and I’d also like it to stir something real in whoever lives with it. Calm and depth don’t have to be opposites.

The name Fengshuimus carries two threads of my story. It nods to the art of feng shui and the three years I spent living in Hong Kong absorbing Eastern culture and art. And to ‘Shamus’, the nickname I’ve had since childhood. I live and work in Cape Town

sEAN eADY