Sheila Allan

    

     Sheila Allan began drawing at an early age in Edinburgh, Scotland. At the age of 11 she started her education in art and after immigrating to Canada in 1967, she entered a contest to paint a mural and won a prize.

 

     As a child, Allan was always drawing people’s faces, and found she had an ability to capture facial features quickly and accurately. Her great uncle Hargrieve, an avid supporter of art in her youth told her to “draw what you see” and those words have stayed with her.

 

     Her formal education in art began at the age of 18 at the Vancouver School of Art, continued at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and was later completed at the University of Victoria in 1984 when she received her BFA in Visual Arts.

 

     In 1978, after reading an article in a magazine about a courtroom artist, she decided it was something she wanted to pursue. After spending many hours drawing people in court, Allan was hired for her first trial in 1982 by CBC News. Over the past thirty years she has sketched at hundreds of trials, working for CBC, CTV, Global News, City and Omni TV. Her work has been published in The Vancouver Sun, the Province, and the Globe and Mail. She continues to draw in B.C. courts and is one of only a few people in the province of British Columbia who are still hired by TV news to draw courtroom sketches.

 

     After working for years in Broadcast and video production Allan is returning to her roots and her love of portraiture.

 

     She currently lives in North Vancouver with her husband and two adult daughters.

 

    -  “I have always had a fascination for portraiture and drawing faces, it’s something I developed early. I think faces reveal the soul. I’m striving to get a likeness, I’m fascinated by what pencil and watercolour … can convey on paper or oil on a canvas. Manipulating graphite and pigment and somehow transferring what you’re seeing with your eyes into the likeness of a person. Drawing is so immediate and I just love that process. There’s a challenge there, its very raw... there’s a technical part to it, but there’s also a magical part too.”

 

                                                                        -Sheila Allan