Sharon Orleans Lawrence:
“I’m not interested in portraying the tragic or seamy side of anything,” says painter Sharon Orleans Lawrence. “Life has enough angst without multiplying it by regurgitating it in paint. I expect my work to make people think, but it’s just as important to me that they enjoy looking at my paintings. I want them to walk away feeling as if the experience had added something positive to their lives.”
A graduate of the Savannah College Art and Design with a MFA in Painting, Sharon currently teaches at a community college on the coast of North Carolina where she was born. “I always feel like I should be painting boats and oceans, since that’s what I see all the time,” she says, “but my current body of work is large-format flowers. I like taking small, ephemeral flowers and painting them big, bold and dramatic. In this way, they become metaphors for contemporary female experience, combining femininity in their beauty and color with feminism in their boldness and in-your-face drama.”
Showing her training in classical methods of drawing and painting, Sharon’s work is invitingly warm, full of rich color and intriguing forms. “In the classical tradition, I paint in layers in oil on linen or canvas, building from a warm, dark underpainting. Since I paint from live flowers in natural light, the flower I begin with goes through the process of dying and new flowers bud, open, reach maturity and then also begin to fade. As I build the layers of paint, I refer to the first flower as well as to its successor(s), allowing each to become part of the image. In the final layers of the painting, working from the memory of the first and the ideas presented in subsequent flowers, I choose for the benefit of the completed work.
“That process of approaching each new layer of paint with expectancy and flexibility, building on and sometimes correcting the previous layer, is very much like my approach to life – engaging the reality before me, changing what doesn’t work for me, taking the bad with the good, and trying to make something beautiful out of the whole experience. I try to concentrate on overcoming, not succumbing—painting keeps me focused on beauty, no matter what may be going on around me. It’s my vocation, my avocation, my therapy, and my meditation ritual.
“I think that beauty is important, though the contemporary art scene—or contemporary life, for that matter—doesn’t have much respect for it. You may not be able to prove what beauty is, but you know it when you experience it, you recognize its reality, you feel the pleasure of it – the ongoing pleasure of the beautiful. Beauty is an accessible miracle, moving you to something beyond art or science to a meaning always expanding just beyond your reach. I am always reaching for beauty in my work.”
Sharon is represented by Vision Gallery in North Carolina, and more of her work may be seen by visiting their website at www.twogalleries.net.