Sharon Cannon is an abstract artist based in Los Angeles, California. With a lifelong passion for art, Sharon's artistic journey has taken her through various careers, including owning an art gallery as well as VP of Unique Projects for a high-end outdoor furniture company where she collaborated with creative designers, building furniture for cruise ships, parks, restaurants, public buildings, and individual clients.
In her artistic practice, Cannon's creations challenge the structured nature of her previous career, where work was meticulously planned, subjected to committee revisions, and designed for mass production. In contrast, her art celebrates spontaneity and intuition, a process that can span weeks or even months for each piece. She adds and subtracts elements until a moment of inspiration guides her to the work's completion. Although Sharon's strokes are deliberate, her paintings are never pre-planned. Instead, each artwork is a reflection of her emotions and feelings at that very moment, translated onto the canvas. Her themes resonate universally and transcend the constraints of physics, inhabiting a realm of untamed, cathartic expression.
In Sharon's own words, "I like to commence my work with a single color. As I apply the first strokes and colors, I embrace experimentation with additional hues and shapes, continually building upon the canvas to create texture and depth. Rather than pre-determine my work, I let the canvas be my guide, allowing the artwork to take its own form and reach its unique conclusion.
Sharon's artistic journey has been enriched by her studies with notable mentors, including Susan Manders in Los Angeles, as well as collaborations with artists in Scotland and Cornwall.
My work explores a multitude of day-to-day human experiences through an abstract language of color and mark making. Beginning with color, found intuitively, I embark upon a dialog with the painted surface through a vocabulary of mark making - pushing and pulling the surface, painting out, painting in, until that surface is able to "speak" for itself. Harmonizing the color in its own right, lifting and dropping tones until the point at which the painting just "clicks" into place. For me, the act of naming the painting is as important as the act of making. Once complete, each painting suggests its subject to me - a stream of traffic, a field of end of season flowers - whatever it is, the painting knows who it is.