“The application of paint on a canvas requires endless decisions, many of them unconscious. What happens on the surfaces of my paintings is an expressive reaction ... composed intuitively ... that celebrates the character of the form.”    ~  Sharon Harris

An early art mentor once told Sharon Harris, “You need to learn how to see.” That pivotal moment transformed her life as an artist, deepening and enlivening a body of work that would span three decades and a variety of media. Whether fabrics or watercolors, oils or metals, Harris’s art depends upon her capacity to see, the willingness to trust her instincts, and the courage to explore texture, light, drama, and color in a uniquely spontaneous response to the subject before her.
Born in the San Fernando Valley, Harris is a second generation Californian raised with her parents and two siblings in the town of Newhall. She earned undergraduate (BS) and graduate (MS) degrees in nursing from UCLA, working for several years with only the most seriously ill children. She left the profession in response to her desire to create—a need she has felt from first memory.
Harris found her way to painting through a series of art classes in La Jolla. Concurrently, she began her formal studies in design and composition with quilt artist, Michael James. “He taught painting and creating based on principles of art to master individual work assignments” she says, “to paint off the color wheel, using alternating opposites and analogous hues to create pattern on pattern in applications for interpretations of concepts... I learned to think, work and execute quickly.”
Beginning with her first-chosen medium, fibers of every type in silk, wool and linen, Harris began to show her work in the ‘90s, at galleries and fiber arts exhibitions from San Diego to Yokohama, Japan. In the early 2000s, her paintings were featured regularly at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and Morro Bay Art Center. Exhibitions have hung at resorts, salons, and wineries throughout the San Diego and San Luis Obispo Counties. Solo painting exhibitions include La Jolla’s Frame Masters and Fine Art, as well as San Luis Obispo’s Gulliver’s Travels and the Ian Saude Gallery.
Opera San Luis Obispo commissioned Harris to curate and create works of art for three productions, including paintings, a collection of masks, lacquer boxes. Her works have been featured in national quilting publications and local newspapers since the 1990s.
Today, Harris devotes most early mornings to painting, mixing colors on the spot as her subject suggests, finding great freedom and flexibility in that spontaneous process. She works with a knife more often than brushes, a technique she finds more conducive to abstraction.
Harris believes in going where she is drawn, to what gives her joy. She is attracted to beaches, where the images shift from pensive to peaceful hour to hour, sometimes moment to moment; and to the Coastal skies, where the early mornings and late afternoons carry an apricot glow unmatched anywhere else in the world.

Artist Statement

There is something spontaneous that happens on the surface of a work that is at once a part of the subject and an integral working of the media as well as a part of myself.  By that is meant, the nature or chemistry of creating a painting.  The very application of paint with a brush on a canvas with the intent of representing a form begins a process that moves me as the artist, in a direction requiring endless decisions, not all conscious.  To this end, the layering or scraping of paint, marking with crayon or knife, all contribute to the effect that conveys a textural structure to support an expressive whole; that of the idea of the subject.  My purpose is to keep the format informal by using mental images allowing the oil media to predominate, thereby forming the setting, the ground or textural content all of which then celebrate the character of the form.
The parts of the subject and ground, developed in the paint, take on the expression or attitude which convey mood and feeling.  Although the appearance may seem casual, certainly the nuances or subtleties of line referring to an image, is the suggested point of interest.  Added to this is color which is the overriding sense of expression.  None of these elements are planned but each are found, explored, worked and reworked until a pleasing and satisfying result is achieved.  None are happier than those which are spontaneous and successful!  The goal is not to be literal in the effort but to explore thought, ideas and how expression of the shapes in oil may be defined.  Further, I would hope to become more abstract in my efforts in exploring the dimensions of the composition.   Specifically, can spontaneous application worked in the alla prima style with a textural approach find enough elucidation to support this context in an artistic manner?   Rendering the painting, exploring the form, in constantly dynamic states is worthy of pursuit in any media.  For the moment I find it challenging, exciting and satisfying to pursue in oil on canvas.