I grew up with the smell of turpentine and linseed oil, as my father, Hill Sharp, was a portrait painter in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s and ‘50’s in Muncie, Indiana. My early desire to be a baseball player was overtaken by the notion of being an artist when I was around 17 years of age and I saw myself wielding a paint brush in a Greenwich Village garret rather than then throwing a curve ball from the mound at Yankee Stadium.
In 1960, after graduating from Burris HS, I attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and in 1961 was selected to become one of the students in the first Fine Art Course ever offered at Pratt. I studied with some of the best teachers, including Gabriel Laderman who made a lasting impression on me. I committed to be a painter and my father gave me his baret.
Off and on, for the next 7-8 years, I attended a number of art schools while working at a variety of jobs. In those years I was trying to learn the steps by which as a young artist I could “awaken my Muses”. My father, who was a great artist himself and had several renowned teachers, including Wayman Adams and George Luks, advised me that “the best way to learn to paint is to find an artist you admire and try to get into his studio to learn from him”. With a very sincere effort I have sought teachers and found them everywhere throughout my life.
In ‘63 I went to “Belles Artes”, in San Miguel Allende, Mexico where I learned different concepts including how to use the ‘S’ curve in art and how to understand mystery of the ‘diminishing image’ in visionary art. Later, In Cincinnati I took drawing and painting courses in the Cincinnati Museum of Fine Art art education program. While living in Cincinnati I met the artist Travis Bryan who became my life-long friend and mentor. It was in Cincinnati that I had my first one man show at “The Bookstore” on Hill Street in 1964. My next Art School was John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. The instructors there were serious and merciless in their criticisms, but I learned discipline and how to refine a work. After a period in Yellow Springs Ohio, attending Senior Art seminars at Antioch college, I spent several years in San Diego. There I worked under another great mentor, Joseph Garidini , a gifted artist who opened my eyes to the methods of the Renaissance masters and gave me enduring knowledge about portraiture. And for memorable teachers, I must also mention my own father, Hill Sharp, who schooled me in painting and introduced me to the tools of art that still inform my work today.
My other “career” during all my years of painting, up until 1991 when I began painting full time, was as a leather craftsman. Back in the summer of 1960 before I went to Pratt, I learned how to make custom sandals in the leather shop of Bruce Adams on Cape Cod. My mother, Ruth, an Art teacher, encouraged me that summer to learn sandal making as a way to help pay for college. At that time I did not see the strong relationship between craft and art, but over the next 30 years I learned that being a master craftsman translates directly to painting.
In the sixties leather was ‘King’. By 1967 I was living and working with Roger Rilleau, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Roger was a famous sandal maker, master craftsman and genius who by grace showed me the secrets of ‘Craftsmanship’. He taught by demonstration, and slowly initiated me into the art of great sandal making and how to respect and handle tools. After more than 10,000 years of men making sandals, Roger designed a sandal that was more functional and comfortable than all past designs and strap configuration in history (and I’ve seen them all). The Rilleau sandal was a masterpiece.
In 1973 I opened my own leather shop and art gallery called “The Blue Wheel” in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. In addition to making sandals and belts, I continued to paint and matured as an artist. I painted primarily landscapes, inspired by the beauty of the Great Marsh at Sandy Neck. The Blue Wheel functioned as my leather shop, my studio, and an art gallery. I held shows of local Cape Cod artists every two weeks in the summer; among them were my father, Hill Sharp, who painted watercolor scenes all over the Cape, configurist painter and friend Travis Bryan, local and well-known oil painter Arthur Bourbeau, Dennis, MA muralist Peggy Grose, potter Tina Holl, and many others. Arthur Bourbeau, in particular, who was by then retired from teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, became a great influence on my painting. He showed me the power color has and pushed me to work through my fear of using it. I have been working on the harmonics of color ever since.
I met and fell in love with my future wife Janet, in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1979. While she went to graduate school, I took my leather shop to Key West, Florida during the years 1981-84. My shop was on the corner of Green and Ann Streets, about 200 feet from the bar of Hemingway, “Sloppy Joes”. I could have hit it with a stone from my front stoop. It was a very ‘hip’ shop and I made a lot of money (for me) for the first time in my life.
Later, in 1987 The Blue Wheel was sold, and I moved to Northampton, Massachusetts and opened “Northampton Leather”. By 1991, Janet and I were married and had a 1 year old son, Simeon. The leather market dropped off and I made the decision to paint full time, wonderfully supported by my wife. Simeon and I were with each other every day in those times, as I was his primary care giver while Janet followed her career as a Clinical Nutritonist. I rented a loft in a four story recently renovated factory called “The Arts and Industry” building, in Florence, MA. I was among the first to rent there and created a studio in a huge, high-ceiling space on the 4th floor, becoming part of the artist community that developed in the building over the next 15 years.
During this period I was inspired by the writings of Jean Baptist Simeon Chardin, the curator at the Lourve and court painter for Marie Antoinette who painted what Marie called “ little gems” or small, close-up still life paintings of minimal subjects. I began several series in this style. It was Chardin’s use of light that made his paintings sparkle and which I tried to use in my own paintings. The first series was a dozen Rose paintings. They are traditional still life paintings, with an old world feeling.
For my next series, I was influenced by a biography of Paul Gauguin, called The Noble Savage, which led me to a deep study of his paintings and his use of the secondary colors. Almost exclusively I began to use orange, green, and purple as my primary colors in the Green Apple paintings while minimally using red, yellow , and blue. This series became popular and sold regularly at the Lenox Fine Arts gallery in the Berkshires. After a show of them in the Hosmer Gallery, the Trustees of the Forbes Library bought one for their permanent collection. now displayed on the second floor.
Incorporating Authur Bourbou’s emphasis on the power of color and my friend Travis Bryant’s configurist abstractions, I then took still life painting to a more imagined realm. The use of black as a central focus within a colorful milieu became the “Black Cat “ series (though not all include a cat!). These abstracted still life paintings employ color, lines, and geometric shapes in a playful and imagined interior.
In 2006, I decided to move from the Arts and Industry studio and build my own studio behind our house in Florence, MA. It took two years to build a two story, 800 square foot building that became the basis of a portrait studio, my next endeavor. Trained in portraiture by my father and later by mentor Joe Garidini, I spent the next 8 years painting commissioned portraits.
By 2015, my wife was ready to retire after working as a clinical dietitian for 30 years, and I too felt the desire to just paint without regard to selling. We spent the next 6 winters in Southwest Florida, where the tropical colors overwhelmed me and my muses called to me. I began painting abstracted landscapes in Florida during the winter and in our backyard in the summer, inspired there by the splendor of our backyard gardens.
These recent works are a study in color and shape and are done in my own evolved style. I reduce the shapes I see in nature to their simplest geometric form and, a la Matisse, I invent color without fear. My life-long studies in anthropology and mythology inspired references interwoven in the archetypal shapes of the bird, breast, and serpent in my work. I have no bounderies in the scope of my paintings. I paint to “ hear the Muses’ song” with love and joy. This is my ‘’Artistic License”, and it’s old and well used.