Members' Juried  PAAM

Featuring works by: Douglas Bick, Chip Brock, Barbara Cantor, Ted Chapin, John Cira, Cathleen Daley, Alice Denison, Mary Doering, Tim Donovan, John Economos, Orfeo Fabbri, Joe Fiorello, Miriam Fried, Tighe Hanson, Mark Heitzman, Jerry Holmes, Don Krohn, Elizabeth Lazeren, Michelle Leier, Cherie Mittenthal, Todd Perry, David Polley, Gail Sharretts, Joe Trepiccione, Selina Trieff, Christine Vaillancourt, M. Villani, Rachel White, Tim Winn, Mike Wright, Joyce Zavorskas, James Zimmerman

The Nantucket Independent

August 12, 2009

Gail Sharretts
In The Studio

BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

Gail Sharretts is a fine painter and perfectly capable of rendering masterly and distinguishable still lifes or landscapes, but that is not really where her heart is these days.

"The abstract work is an evolution," she said, her shock of short blond hair highly contrasted against the muted shades of a scene in France hanging in her Surfside Road gallery. "It is more about sensation, color and rhythm."

In part because of those characteristics that energize her art, regardless of style or subject, Sharretts never uses photos for reference that many painters rely on for memory and composition.

"I'm a real purist. I go outside and struggle with the elements. I've been pelted with trees, with my own paintings and my palette. It's a challenge," she explained, becoming introspective. "Going inside — meaning me — that's where the abstract work evolves. There is not a lot of intention. It shifts from representational images to more personal poetry."

As is typical with accomplished adult artists, Sharretts drew a lot as a child, but named her true first passion as sculpture.

"I have no explanation. I've always loved the natural world and art and culture."

After graduating from high school in Baltimore, Md., where she was raised, Sharretts entered the Schuler School of Fine Arts, a five-year private school where she was trained in Flemish painting and traditional techniques of grinding her own pigments, cooking her own oil paints and preparing canvases. She learned to paint in oils and watercolors, to sculpt and cast, and of the essential elements of anatomy.

Following art school she was an apprentice to a Baltimore stone carver for a couple of years, then studied decorative painting at a Baltimore company. After visiting a friend on Nantucket and being captured by the island's beauty, Sharretts moved here in 1981 and began her own decorative painting business while simultaneously completing her independent canvases and sculptures. She continues to work in the decorative arts creating murals, decorative interiors and finishes and fresco designs in private homes.

Now, she said, her motivation toward classical sculpture is moving on from the figurative mode to using different materials and molding a variety of subjects. All the things she does are part of her inner drive to experiment with ways to express her multiple abilities and inspirations.

"You are in a relationship with the paintings, so I wake up in the morning excited about the dialogue and where the work is going to take me."

There are so many creative projects that Sharretts would like to pursue in the future she does not know where to begin talking about them. And she knows, as do her peers, that the term 'starving artist' has relevance. Many forms of art require benefactor's funding and some assistance, so she is searching for mainland representation to add to her island art community support system to be able to exhibit work that sparks her talent other than paintings reflecting only Nantucket influences.

Sharretts is currently showing work in Provincetown and in her personal gallery.