top of page

Chance, Memory and Awe

  • Writer: sharonkingston
    sharonkingston
  • Mar 29, 2011
  • 3 min read

Untitled work in progress, 24 x 30 in (4/4)

I consider one of the great benefits of being an artist to be the ability to choose my own subject.  And if I so desire, incorporate life experiences, synchronicity, and downright awe of nature’s beauty into my work.  Everyday I feel it a responsibility of my practice to notice what I notice and then make a choice to connect these sensations to some larger issue that’s been on my mind or in my conversations or to a piece of poetry, and create from nothing a newness surrounding this source material.  I know it sounds mystic, but to take what I see, hear, think, feel, imagine and sense and mold it into a unique statement of my relationship to my subject is the reason I keep approaching the canvas.  I’m rarely aware of the connections and linkages that are happening in the process of painting, and ever surprised through writing or talking about my work as to how it all comes to be.

I’ve been painting these misty hills since last October.  I feel comforted by this “softness touching the earth” and have become quite obsessed, as has the rest of my family, with taking note of the drama that unfolds in front of us daily.  I just don’t believe that blue skies could ever measure up with sentiments that exhibit themselves in the clouds of the Pacific Northwest.  As I’ve discussed previously in this blog here, I have a particular affinity to the skyscape/cloudscape as subject.  Impermanence, mystery, associations with the unknowable are all larger issues that get explored through this subject via the poetry of Rilke.

I have been a studio painter for all time–never en plein air.  I–in the words of Joan Mitchell whose paintings  I so greatly admire but have little in common with my works–like to say that I paint the landscape that’s inside me.  I have always used photographs to begin paintings and then allowed the painting to unfold. Obviously, my experiences with my environment greatly translate these beginnings into a finished work that is sometimes reflective of where I live but more often just the essence of place.  Recently, however, my paintings have taken on more local and realistic landscape references.  I’m watching this change and will only fight this new desire for a less abstracted reality when the nuances, accidents and my responses to how my paint|medium|surface reacts become overshadowed by a desire to replicate that which I see.  Making my own world versus the safety of depicting reality–something Rilke wrote about here.

Whoever you may be, step into the evening Step out of the room where everything is known Whoever you are your house is the last before the far off With your eyes, which are almost too tired to free themselves from the familiar You slowly take one black tree and set it against the sky slender, alone. And you have made a world. It is big and like a word, still ripening in silence And though your mind would fabricate its meaning Your eyes tenderly let go of what they see. Yesterday a chance errand and an accident on the freeway causing a huge backup left me the audience to some spectacular cloud drama in the Skagit Valley and Chuckanut Ridge areas.  I did not have a camera to capture nor a driver to take over so that I could fully immerse myself in the spectacle.  I did, however,  have an underpainting for another work prepped in the studio.  Today it became the manifestation of some of my memory from yesterday’s awe.

 
 
 

Commentaires


studio/gallery

open by appointment only

please call / text

360-739-2474 or

email sharonkingston@me.com

ALL SALES FINAL.

NO REFUNDS or EXCHANGES ON ORIGINAL PAINTINGS  and FRAMES.

    • Instagram

    Sharon Kingston is a Bellingham WA (Washington) based artist.  As an oil painter she uses the properties of her medium to create paintings that respond to both the atmosphere of her surroundings and poetry. This method of looking inward and outward and, in the moments of painting, finding her way on the canvas is her approach to creating paintings infused with poetry and the memory of landscape. The atmospheric element of her work is a testament to her desire to create spaces that are undefined, contemplative and allow room to reflect and accept uncertainty. Poetry, by nature open ended, is used both in the conceptualization of the work and as a part of the studio practice. The words of Rainer Rilke have informed Sharon’s work for many years, but she also turns to contemporary poetry when it resonates with her life. She uses layers of transparent color, reveals forms by concealing and unearthing pentimenti and suggests elements of landscape in her process.

    People describe her paintings as ethereal, atmospheric, contemplative, PNW inspired, and filled with light and mood.  She has a storefront art studio in downtown Bellingham and welcomes you view her paintings in person.

    SHARON KINGSTON STUDIO

    203 PROSPECT ST

    Bellingham WA  98225

    studio gallery 
    open by appointment

    please send me a text with the
    day and time you'd like to come by.
    360-739-2474

    bottom of page