“I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing – the contingent way that images arrive in the work – lies some kind of model of how we live our lives.  The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.”     – William Kentridge  

Sharon Wybrants’ Artist’s Statement: 

During January and February of this year I was lucky enough to spend three weeks working at the Millay Colony, an artists’ residency, in Austerlitz, NY, and began a piece that will involve forty nine surfaces, seven across and seven up.  I completed the first ten works in this piece while at Millay.  The piece involves my growing consciousness of the importance of the seven chakras, the locations in the body that are energy sources, and it also involves my growing understanding of the importance of the five elements, an ancient Chinese system of understanding reality.  These systems are centuries-old sources of wisdom that we may draw upon to learn to better organize our lives and understand how to heal ourselves and the world, to bring our body/mind/spirit into greater harmony with a larger reality.  I am a beginner on this path, and I hope always to be.  It is pulling my work forward. 

That is what happens in my work.  I am pulled along by forces that I don’t usually understand but have learned not to question.  Last March, I came to realize that I needed to get to Puerto Rico to paint the rain forest, so I went online and contacted someone renting a house in the rain forest and offered to barter, to exchange a small painting for the rent for one week, and I went and produced two paintings of waterfalls and one of El Yunque, the mountain in the rain forest that is named for god.  These pieces became a part of a series that I have been working on since 1999, entitled “Endangered Species.”  In this series I celebrate artists, all the religions of the world, small family farms, forests, rivers, oceans, and rain forests, since all are endangered species. 

Last summer I felt compelled to get to the ocean to paint, and I did.  As I painted the ocean from the coast of Maine, I came to the conclusion that I could not “capture” the reality or even the essence of a wave.  When I tried, the wave turned to cement under my brush.  As I continued to work, it came to me that all I could do in my work was to “sing along.”  My job seems to be to show up, hone my craft, pay attention to the light, and turn the results over to my Higher Power.  My attitude needs to be one of humility and awe if good things are to happen.  When my brain engages, the magic seems to end.   The time for critical judgment is, for me, after the fact.  Once I have the piece back in the studio, I may decide that I need to make some corrections to make it a better painting.  Usually, however, the original was fresher and my “corrections” are not an improvement.   Learning to accept the imperfect as perfect will be a lifelong project for me.

I believe that, as a visual artist, it is essential for me to continually study the foundations of visual art.  I will never know enough.  I love the fundamentals of drawing and painting from observation, of creating the magical illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface.   As much as I love the fundamentals of drawing and painting from observation, I have never wanted to stop learning about new ways of thinking about and making art.   I have a Masters of Arts in Painting from Hunter College, but my art career began early.  As a little child, I only ever wanted to be an artist, a painter.  I have been seriously studying painting since I was four, when I worked in my own studio, and I was working in oil by seven, mentored by an artist family friend.  Beginning at eleven, I began spending all my Saturdays in life drawing classes for adults at The Arts Students League.  I loved the smells of oil paint and the artists hanging out in the basement cafeteria.  It seemed like Paris to me, and I wanted to go to the artists’ and models’ ball, but it was X-rated, and my parents were kill-joys.   Also at eleven,  I apprenticed to a Portuguese Surrealist in Greenwich Village who had me copy Botticelli and grind my own oils.  I would work with him one Saturday morning a month.  Every Saturday afternoon, I drew from the classical sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I  would run around the  museum in my bare feet and sketch everything I could.  I knew all the guards.  It was my favorite home.   Since then  I have never really stopped studying.  I have learned from teachers at Rhode Island School of Design, Native American shamans painting in sand, professors of aesthetics and philosophy of art at Indiana University Graduate School, the poverty stricken rural first graders I was given the opportunity to introduce to the idea of making images when I was first out of college, graduate painting professors from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College Graduate School, Maryland Art Institute, SVA, and from Caravaggio, Rubins, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Corot, Goya, Vincent Van Gogh, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, William DeKooning, Eva Hess, William Kentridge, and, of course, many, many others.   Little children, the young man who was paralyzed and painted holding the brush in his teeth, students who had autism, and the old man in the film, “The Cats of Mirikitani,” these are the people who have taught me, and who continue to teach me, the “why” of making art.   Without a good “why,” the “how” is not of much use.

Right now it is very important that we all remember that making art is a radical, revolutionary act.  If we doubt the power of art to affect the course of human affairs,  we need to visit Picasso’s “Guernica” or Goya’s “The Disasters of War.”  Right now, in the Spring of 2010, we can see the work of William Kentridge at The Museum of Modern Art  to understand how essential art is in healing the world.

And, as Pema Chodron reminds us, healing others can only come from healing ourselves, compassion for others can only come out of a practice of compassion for ourselves, so we must all understand that our own ideas and feelings are valid and useful and deserving of expression.  We must claim our own voices and have the courage to use them.   This is our world’s only hope.

I love to paint people.  I always have.  Doing a portrait of someone is like having an affair with them.  There is hardly anything as intimate.   I also paint myself.  It is a way of coming to understand who I am, and it is a way of coming to understand who you are.  I feel that if I have the courage to look into my own eyes and to tell the truth as I find it there, then maybe you will have the courage to do the same.  And, I am trying to find, by searching my own face, my own soul, a better understanding of what it means to be a human being.

Many before me have said that it takes a great deal of courage to face a blank page in a notebook, a blank computer screen, or a blank canvas.  The void can be terrifying.  However, if you don’t recognize that human mark-making has throughout human history, and even before history, been the one consistent method of expressing and defining consciousness, of straining toward the supernatural, of trying to make sense of the universal, of appeasing the gods, of bringing quiet and order to the mind, of offering a hope of salvation, of connecting with the cosmos, of leaving a record, and of screaming into the night when all else fails; if we don’t all agree that art is the only thing human beings leave behind when we die that says that we were here, that we cared, and that we wanted to communicate that caring to someone, somewhere, then we cannot agree that it takes any courage at all to face the blank page.  Why would it matter?  What could possibly make it frightening?  If awareness of our consciousness is not seen as the goal of existence, then mark-making has no value.  If we no longer value the need to connect, to be in communion, to experience empathy, to know one’s self or another, to find or create meaning out of meanness and order out of chaos, then we have no shared place in which to stand to begin our journey.  The first principle that has to be established is the relevancy of art making to being human.  Once a person knows “why” it matters to make art, then the person becomes willing to learn “how.” 

Since I can remember, I have drawn and painted from observation, searching for the truth both out there and in me, feeling like I am working as a conduit of some force that is greater than I am and that, once in a while uses me to make a painting that means something and moves people.  Every day of work, every stroke of the brush, however, whether or not successful, gives me connection with that power in the universe, the underlying oneness of it all, and I get to feel connected to it and to all things.  Hard work, learning the fundamentals, studying one’s craft year after year, day in and day out, and then letting it all go in the complete mystery of life, the total impossibility of capturing anything but signs and symbols that refer to this and that experience, arrows really, pointing to some obscure notion of “truth” that we perceive, a small sliver of reality, that’s all we can hope for, but, strangely, it seems to be quite enough to build a life upon.  It takes the courage to go forward, trying to learn everything we can, while knowing that we really know nothing, and that it really matters that we do it anyway. Being a true artist is being willing to make all your mistakes in public.  That’s what I am beginning to understand.  It isn’t about showing off what you know.  It is about being willing to be totally naked when you feel least attractive.  I would like to be willing to allow you to know that my life is messy, but worth it.

My life’s goal is to paint like Janis Joplin sang and not have it kill me. 

Sharon Wybrants