Shana Sharp, Landscapes and Flowers
Novemer 8 - December 21, 2019
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Shana Sharp, Landscapes and Flowers
November 8 - December 21, 2019
Opening reception: Friday November 8, 6-9 pm
2831 Mission St
Et al. is very pleased to present an exhibition of the self taught, Sonoma-based painter Shana Sharp.
Long-time Bay Area resident Shana Sharp paints the world around her. Whether it be the idyllic, if endangered landscapes around Sonoma, flowers from her garden or the architecture of Roma Sur in Mexico City, what she depicts is almost always experienced first hand, photographed, and then painted with a disarming honesty and directness. It is almost as if things were suddenly, yet carefully seen, and then portrayed as such. How does she do this? Unencumbered by any conventional, academic training, she manages to preserve the relative purity of a personal, idiosyncratic vision of the world while foregrounding the sensual immediacy of paint. In other words, the work is refreshingly bullshit-free (the near impossible dream of every painter). If becoming a painter is a process of learning everything and forgetting it in order to develop one’s own language, then Sharp seems to have skipped this process and gone directly to her own marking making and pictorial idiom. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see echoes of say Alice Neel or Fairfield Porter in the intimacy of what she makes. Some have remarked parallels to the work with Lois Dodd or Charles Burchfield, but what and how Sharp paints is irreducibly her own.
For her exhibition at Et al., the artist presents a selection of landscapes and floral works which unequivocally celebrate the suddenness of seeing. Characterized by close ups, the foreground of her landscapes occupies a significant part of the painting while the floral works could be read as what a bee blissfully perceives just before landing.
Shana Sharp (b.1953) lives and works in Sonoma, California. She has had solo exhibitions at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018, and at Third Floor, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, 2019. Her work was also featured in “City Prince/ess" at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2019.