Tony "Doc" Shiels, R.I.P. (1938-2024)

I only recently found out about the passing of Tony "Doc" Shiels. In February of 2013, I posted a "Top Ten" list of important Fortean books, one of which was Shiels' 1990 memoir, MONSTRUM!: A WIZARD'S TALE. You can see the entire list right HERE.

What follows is a brief excerpt from Charles Darwent's 7-30-24 GUARDIAN obituary for Shiels: 

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 [...].

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.

If you want to read the entire obituary, click HERE. 

You can watch MAKING MARKS, Ben MacGregor's award-winning short documentary about the life and work of Shiels, by clicking HERE.