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 out of the sound of color. I could say that through memory I summon up the essence, the ineffability, of an emotion or deeply felt experience and transmute it onto canvas. However, it is not I who am transmuting it, but rather, it is the play of materials which summons up a familiarity, finally, 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.