| Occupation | Artist and Art Educator |
|---|---|
| Location | Bellingham, WA |
| Introduction | Sharon Kingston is a Bellingham-WA based oil painter. She paints invented and imagined spaces infused with metaphor and poetry. Her most recent paintings, the Reading Rilke series, have been inspired by the writings and poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. It is the desire to balance inner and outer realities, light and dark, and hope and struggle rather than the articulation of any particular place that drives her process. Transformation, impermanence, the unknown and the unsaid are just some themes that present themselves in her paintings. Working to modify an underlying state of complexity and to coax a simple beauty out of it all, Sharon's paintings seem minimalist at first glance but with time present a lushness and depth of color and a softness of edge that engages the viewer's imagination and conveys a sense of place through saturated layers of transparent glazes. Influenced by Mark Rothko, J.M.W. Turner, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, who said "For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value", her intention is not to paint a landscape, but to evoke the atmosphere, emotion, memory, or simply the essence of space and place. |
