PAINTING TO EXPLORE;PAINTING TO CONNECT
SHARON THOMPSON
Contact: sharonthompson.ca@gmail.com
For Sharon Thompson, painting is a primary way to explore and connect with self, society and Mother Earth. Her painting practice has two branches—an abstract branch and a landscape and floral branch. She is attracted to landscape and floral painting, “for the opportunity to connect to the beauty, strength and power of the earth,” she explains, and to abstract painting,” for its capacity to express and explore from inside, what it means to be alive and human.” She loves how the two practices support, nourish and expand each other.
She was born and raised on a small farm outside Peterborough Ontario. Her chief joy as a child was roaming the surrounding hills and woods. Family camping trips exposed her to the wonders of the wilderness of Northern Ontario. “This joy and the sense of oneness I felt with nature as a child,” she said, “ would become a primary source for my future art making”.
The study of a musical instrument was of great importance in the household. As a young child, Thompson studied the piano under the tutelage of a classically trained pianist and later she also learned the cello. “I loved sound and rhythm as a child,” she said, “and I credit the early study of music for helping me to attune to structure, expressiveness, rhythm and movement, all of which are central to my art practice.”
In Grade nine, Thompson recalls standing at the door of the high school art room longing to be a participant but she would hear a voice in her head saying ‘you can’t do this; you could never succeed at this’. The longing to make art persisted however and finally as a wife and mother of 3 small children, she gathered her courage and applied and was accepted into the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program at Queens University in Kingston Ontario. She graduated four years later with First Class Honours. “I have been grateful ever since” she says, “for this opportunity to learn basic fundamentals in drawing, painting and sculpture and for the art history which gave me exposure to some of the historical artists like Cezanne, Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn and the Abstract Expressionists who became cornerstones in my development.”
She has been a serious working professional artist ever since,first in Kingston, Ontario and since 2019, in Calgary Alberta. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively in group and solo shows in Canada and the USA, and are in private and public collections in Canada, USA, the UK, Germany and New Zealand, including the Permanent Collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), IBM (Toronto), the Ontario Municipal Employees Collection (Toronto), CN Railways (Montreal), Mount Sinai Hospital(Toronto), Minilofts Collection, (Berlin, Germany). She has received Ontario Arts Council grants. Awards received include: The Society of Canadian Artists Award (2003), the Nan Yeomans Legacy Award (2010), the DeSerres Award 2012. She was the recipient of a half scholarship from the Vermont Studio Center. She is a juried member of the Alberta Society of Artist and sits on its board. She is an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Organization of Kingston Women Artists.
Says Thompson,“Throughout my years of painting I have practiced yoga and meditation, and I believe that the somatic awareness that is so central to how I make art has been greatly expanded through these practices. They have helped me to develop a sensitivity to structured, organic wholeness, and they have helped me to nourish my desire to explore the mystery and flow of being alive, and give voice to the strength and love I feel as I paint.”
She works with brushes and oil paint using a process of structured layering to simplify form and create a sense of light, rhythm and energy in her work.
Of her move to Calgary, Alberta she says, “I have been absorbing the beautiful light, and the spacious rolling openness and structured simplicity of the land out here and I am learning to embrace and utilize this new beauty in my painting practices.”
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