Shevaun Doherty tells John P O’Sullivan that a trip to Kew Gardens in London with her aunt decided her vocation
Shevaun Doherty does not have a conventional art background and found her vocation relatively late. Her mother, Cresten, is an art restorer and Shevaun grew up in Dublin with art materials all around her, but her interests lay elsewhere. She had ambitions to be a vet and, as a preliminary step, signed on for a Natural Science degree at Trinity. Romance intervened, however, and at the age of 19 she abandoned her studies, married an Egyptian man and opened a successful restaurant with him in Blackrock. They sold up at the height of the Celtic Tiger in 2004 and moved to Cairo, where they invested in property and lived on the proceeds. With time on her hands, Doherty revived her childhood connection with art and roamed around Cairo and the Sinai region, recording in sketchbooks whatever caught her eye. The images in coloured pencils and pastels included palm trees, exotic vegetation, insects, camels and the ancient souks. She has built an extensive collection of these sketchbooks since, which demonstrate the evolution of her work and her changing locations. ‘You can see my life in my sketchbooks,’ she says.
A seminal moment in her journey occurred during a trip to London with an aunt, when they paid a visit to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art in Kew Gardens. Doherty was transfixed and made a decision: ‘I want to do this – I want to be a botanical artist.’ She saw in this medium a way to combine her interest in the natural sciences with her burgeoning interest in art – to have ‘one foot in the art world and one foot in the science world’. She returned to Cairo and signed up for a two-and-a-half-year distance-learning diploma course with the Society of Botanical Artists in London, of which she is now the President. The course was a very technical one and she learned a lot. ‘You were judged on qualities such as botanical accuracy, presentation and labelling.’ She was told at the beginning to ‘leave [her] Expressionism at the door’. Botanic art is not for the dilettante. The usual medium is watercolour, one which requires extreme care and precision. On a typical painting, Doherty may spend a week on studies and colour matching and up to a month on the actual painting.
To read this article in full, subscribe or buy this edition of the Irish Arts Review
Angela Griffith appraises Paul MacCormaic’s painting of Lucky Khambule, this year’s winner of the Ireland–U.S. Council and Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award
Rachel Thomas interviews Richard Malone, an artist who works across the media of sculpture, fashion and performance, pushing the boundaries of traditional sculpture.
Hilary Pyle recalls the artist Hilda Roberts, two-time winner of the RDS Taylor Art Award, whose talents were apparent from an early age
