About
Virginia Sharkey
I seek what is elemental and essential and that’s why I’m an abstract painter. My aim is existential– I try to convey the quality of being as it is felt in a crystalized presence of memory and time, a kind of suspended musical time from the sound of color. Through memory I summon up the essence, the ineffability, of an emotion or deeply felt experience and transmute it onto canvas by the play of materials into a familiarity that strums a chord for me. The result is a mysterious amalgam that is only a resonance of what was at first intended, for the physical marks on a two-dimensional surface have their own personality and being. And here is where the wrestling with the wilderness of form begins: the confrontation with the elemental forces of color, line and space. I love suggestion and ambiguity, the emerging and coalescing, something immanent and elemental, and the power and mystery of deep time and deep space.