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6 While Shani Rhys James's earlier paintings dealt with the frictions of the mother/daughter relationship and the difficulties experienced as the only child of a flamboyant, itinerant actress, these paintings confront the loss of fertility and ageing. In previous work the mother has been a ubiquitous presence, appearing either as a second figure or transmogrified into a louring black chandelier, akin to Louise Bourgeois's matriarchal spider, Maman, that hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the figure of the girl. There has been much talk of the demise of painting but Shani Rhys James has eschewed fashion to follow her own course in the tradition of Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff, painters who luxuriate in the materiality of paint. Often bracketed with Frida Kahlo and Paula Rego for the confessional qualities in her work, neither of these artist are quite an accurate equivalence, for both are far more graphic. Among her contemporaries Rhys James might more appropriately be seen alongside Chantal Joffe, with whose edgy, painterly canvases hers have something in common. But to find her true precursor we need to go back to the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. For with her sensual fleshy paint, her raw, unflinching self-portraits, and the pull between the psychological difficulties of being a daughter, wife and artist, she inhabits a similar terrain. In Caught in the Mirror, a single figure holds up a small oval looking-glass to confront both bald reality and the passing of time. Here Shani Rhys James scrutinises not only herself as a woman and an artist but holds a questioning glass up to us all. Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, an award-winning poet and novelist.