About photographer

Damian Shields was born in Toronto, Canada, on July 1 1970 and moved to Scotland when he was about three years old. Early influences on his artistic development were his father and late grandfather. His father Dennis, a practising artist (like his father before him), a graduate in sculpture from Ontario School of Art and on his mother's side, his Grandfather Silvio Rossi a painter and teacher. Being exposed to impressionism, abstract expressionism and sculpture in their work gave Damian an early grounding in the importance of form, line, composition and emotional response to the environment without and within.
Initially more at home with charcoal and oil paint, Damian began exploring the creative possibilities of photography in his mid-twenties. During a portfolio presentation course at Strathclyde Arts Centre he became involved in darkroom processing and printing black-and-white film. This sparked the beginnings of a love affair with the medium which subsequently gained him acceptance to the Fine Art Photography department of Glasgow School of Art, then headed by the renowned landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper.
From art school he went on to study electronic publishing at the Glasgow College of Building and Printing, where he continued to develop his skills in digital imaging. He has worked as a professional retoucher in the media industry for the last 12 years and is currently employed as a multimedia production journalist for The Glasgow Herald.