1. Many people think of you as a Charleston artist. When did you first show art in Charleston and what was the reception?
I consider myself a Charleston artist, even if I don’t technically live there; I used to, and that’s good enough for me. Artistically it is home base — always has been, and always will be.
I first showed at Scott Mitchell’s N’Harmony on Capitol Street in 2006. I didn’t exactly take the city by storm or anything. My work was quite small then, and I was petrified, but it was a very positive experience for me, because it gave me the impetus to keep going.
2. Who are your influences?
I’m deeply fascinated with other West Virginia artists, some of whom I have been fortunate enough to know, or meet personally: Dick Allowatt, Charles Jupiter Hamilton, Rebecca Burch, Holly Bess Kincaid (originally from Beckley), Sally Rowe, Rick Lee. These are people who are not afraid to use their tremendous creativity and talent to make the world more beautiful and inspire the rest of us to do the same. These people, however diverse their respective mediums, have incredible precision and focus in their work.
You would not believe how many times I have had to defend my decision to study art and then practice it in West Virginia. There are so many naysayers in the world: “You’ll never get a job.” “What are you going to do with a degree like that?” “Too bad you won’t be able to stay around here. There’ll be no work for you.”
Okay, maybe I’m just lucky, maybe I was in the right place at the right time, and I do feel very, very fortunate to be able to live and work in my home state of West Virginia. It’s people like these, who are so good at what they do, that they make me feel like anything really is possible, and you don’t have to go live in L.A. or New York to do it, either.
3. How do you choose what goes into a show?
My pre-show anxiety is so agonizing that the pieces I choose to exhibit are probably the ones I’ve thrown up over the least. I am notoriously fussy. I have been known to be working on a piece up to two minutes before an opening.
I wouldn’t exhibit anything I couldn’t feel comfortable having on my own walls. I have to use colors I would, myself, wear. It has to strike a chord with me: if it’s dissonant at all, I won’t use it.
4. Will we continue to see your art at the Purple Moon?
Oh yes, I certainly hope so. Chuck and Connie Hamsher are absolutely amazing to work with — they are dynamos! And we actually met through Facebook, through mutual friends, two of those being Sean Richardson and Karen Allen (of Tofujitsu). I’ve known Sean since art school, Sean’s known Chuck even longer than that — it’s like six degrees of Charleston. I love it — it’s all about that sense of community that the ArtWalks promote.
A lot of times I have thought I’m probably a lot like a stray cat that got fed once and showed up every day at the doorstep thereafter — I had an opening at the Moon last February and ever since I’ve somehow maintained a continual installment. Truly I’m so tickled to be a part of all this, I don’t even have words (for once). My work traveled for two years — Wheeling, Pittsburgh, Morgantown — before I landed back here, and there’s no community warmer or more supportive to art than Charleston, W.Va — in my experience.
5. Over time it seems that your pieces have gotten larger. What’s behind this?
My pieces have gotten a lot larger. And a lot braver. I think it’s equivalent to the adolescent kid trying to sing a solo for the student body, and at first she’s trembling and her voice is faint and quavery and then she starts gathering speed, finding her stride and belting it out all over the place like she owns it.
Not that I’d know anyone this might have happened to, of course (cough, cough). Even though the kid I’m thinking of lost her balance and fell into the footlights bringing down the house, amid much (however good-natured) laughter. So much for the finer points of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Same-same with my artworks. Minus the footlight fall, I hope.
6. What’s the largest scale you feel comfortable working at?
Life size. Actually, I think doing some billboard art would be a lifetime achievement for me. My first year in art school, I had a wonderfully crusty old painting professor — J. David Brooks, Fairmont State University — who insisted I tape down butcher paper on a huge, huge slab of Masonite, bigger than I was, and work larger than life for the entire semester.
I really thought he was kidding at first — and I didn’t understand why he singled me out to work that way, or what he saw to make him insist upon it. But you didn’t question his authority, so I did it — and I found it to be very freeing. You can’t micromanage every little detail of the image if you’re out there free floating in space on such a grand scale. If you work larger, your perspective opens, and you’re more focused on just doing it.
I think there’s a great courage in throwing yourself into a vast desert you’ll have to crawl your way back out of — not even with any particular skill, but because you kind of have to. Necessity can be a marvelous motivator.
7. You use a lot of mixed media in your paintings. What is the strangest medium you have worked with?
The strangest medium….[laughs] …I feel like Bill Clinton now. (“Define strange”). I’m notoriously unorthodox with my media, I know. I’ve been known to throw half a cup of black coffee onto a taped-down page of Arches watercolor paper (in fact, I highly recommend it as a starting move). I have this myopic idea that life shouldn’t just imitate art, it ought to be art; so I’d like to think that everything in the world could be pulled into this recreated terrarium of life we call art galleries and museums, where everything is beautiful and the ending is always pleasant. In that view, no medium is really strange. It’s just something you might not have considered before.
I’ve cut off hanks of my own hair, cut up my own clothes and worked them into my sculptures. I imagine most people would feel that’s undeniably strange. I sometimes feel almost a desperation to put myself into my work — literally, if need be.
8. Do you have a website?
I do. It’s at sharonlyn.wordpress.com (s.m.ART). I’m also a writer — I used to work as a newspaper reporter and columnist — and originally I just had a blog so I could keep practicing with words. As that progressed I started slipping drawings and sketches in here and there, to positive feedback, and with that smattering of encouragement I gradually worked myself back into my art again.
Word and image tend to feed off each other, in my experience. People react like it’s unusual to be an artist and a writer, but from where I’ve seen it most artists are also writers, and most writers are also artists. Creative people learn to be amphibious early. It must be part of the gene.
9. What is art?
In art school I wore a yellow pin that said in blue letters, “Art is anything you can get away with.” At the time, I thought it was true; Jeff Koons was the big rock star in the art world then, and it really felt to me as though everything had already been done and there was nothing new to matter anymore. Of course, that was just my cowardice speaking.
Now that I’m in my forties, old but not too terribly venerated, I feel that art is just another form of communication. I was brought up in a very, very religious environment where we were told that the heart of mankind is carnal and evil, but I still maintain that’s inaccurate: in fact, we all have an innate desire to tell the truth. And truth is like an impatient dog straining to break free of the leash: it will get out however it can.
Artists and writers, for whatever reason, have to tell what they see and feel, even if only for their own salvation. That the rest of the world can also take communion with it is one of the side effects/blessings we happen to enjoy.
10. What’s in the future for Sharon Lyn Stackpole?
That’s a question I never, ever look at, because in my world yesterday is irretrievable and tomorrow never comes. It’s always today, irrevocably today — and my ongoing goal for today is unchanging — wherever I go, to leave the place just a little bit nicer than I found it. If we all did that, every day, what a world this would be to inhabit.
