* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Sharon Sprung studied at Cornell, The Art Students League in New York, and the National Academy of Design. Apart from her creative practice, Sprung also teaches painting and drawing at National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts and The Art Students League.
Sharon explains her work by saying, “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”.
Her influences include Caravaggio, Velazquez, Egon Schiele and Kathe Kollwitz.
Her work is included in the collection of the United States House of Representatives, Bell Laboratories, AT&T, Princeton University, Sherman and Sterling, and the Chase Manhattan Bank
She has been an arts educator since 1993