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From Getty ULAN: Shields came to prominence in the 1970s with brightly colored and sewn three-dimensional paintings. He constructed handmade books, and was an accomplished watercolorist and printmaker, often using handmade paper. From National Gallery of Art website profile by Jenevive Nykolak: Shields quickly gained renown for his kaleidoscopic, free-hanging constructions, cobbled together from unconventional materials found on Canal Street. He cut a memorable figure himself, wearing fingernail polish, handmade clothing, and jewelry that matched his art. The rigidity and rationality of the modernist grid is transformed in Shields’s work by a counterculture aesthetic of tie-dye and love beads and by techniques usually associated with feminine labor and the fiber arts. Using the stitched line as a means both to construct and to draw, Shields created multidimensional, double-sided works that resemble paintings expanded into real space. Inspired by the curvilinear interiors of Buckminster Fuller’s utopian architecture, his layered constructions can often be viewed from multiple perspectives. Shields applied rainbow hues of thinned acrylic paint to his eccentric forms and ornamented them with glass beads, wooden dowels, wire, gauze, and zigzag stitching. These intricate surfaces invite close examination even as they dissolve into clouds of lush color from afar. Favoring industrial cotton belting for its sturdiness and flexibility, Shields merged the surface and support of painting, drawing it into new shapes and situations. The rectilinear structure of the grid, deformed by the laxity or tension of the belting, became a frequent subject. In Shape-Up, for instance, tiny garlands of beads cling to the soft, cotton trellis, twisting into three-dimensional tangles of color that echo the bright patches of paint staining the surface. A related piece, rendered in rosy, overheated colors, graced the cover of Artforum in 1971. Other source: At the time of his death he was being treated for emphysema. He died in his sleep.