Melissa Faithful for Art-Sheep
Sharon Sprung is a painter who creates beautiful, delicate paintings, focusing on the human body. Inspired by artists like Caravaggio, Velazquez, Egon Schiele and Kathe Kollwitz, in her series of figurative paintings, Sprung investigates the shape of the female body, its beauty and its uniqueness. Her various models are women with anxieties, deep into their thoughts, with their bodies delicately posing but with their minds being someplace else.
“My paintings are a carefully observed negotiation, manipulated layer upon layer in order to create a work of art as equivalent as possible to the complexity of real life.They are an attempt to control the almost uncontrollable substance that is oil paint, and the equally untamable expression of the human condition. Pushing around puddles of this almost living substance, I am endlessly defining and redefining the craft of oil painting to fabricate an animated, breathing image grounded in the recognizable and familiar. Since I am purposefully involved with the contemporary world, I always seek to merge it with a surface that is at once abstractly patterned and textured, and that combines a meticulous respect for realism with the power of the personal image to speak a universal language. I want the subject and its environment to collide through the use of echo and repetition to form a united composition. We are constantly bombarded visually and I hope to infuse my work with a way of engaging the viewer that is both evocatively silent and powerfully commanding,” Sprung writes on her website.
