SHARON ²: INTERIORS at The Pattern Shop Studio

When we hear the word "interiors" in association with art, most of us imagine Vermeer and the great Dutch genre painters of the 17th century.  But when you think about it, the style didn't die with them. Scores of great artists have painted unforgettable interiors-- Cassatt, Renoir, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Hopper, and Hockney come immediately to mind--and a good many contemporary painters continue to find the tradition attractive and useful.  Among them are the two master oil painters in this show.

Over their long careers, Sharon Brown and Sharon Feder have absorbed the styles available for expressing what they feel and have honed the skills necessary for doing it hauntingly.  Although both of them work in a variety of  forms, each returns periodically to the theme of interiority and the settings in which they and others live out their private lives.  Both paint exteriors--Feder often of buildings, Brown often of faces--but do so in ways that reveal what the exteriors conceal.  This tension of  exterior/interior, public/private, conscious/unconscious runs throughout their work. 

In this show, you can see all of the things you see in classic interiors: empty chairs, books, oriental rugs, paintings on the walls, objects of value to their owners but mysterious to us; slants of light, dogs and cats, beds, people sleeping or musing or reading, but in any case,  unguarded; a human presence in an empty room that is all the stronger for the absence of its inhabitants.  You can feel time and peace and quiet and a certain kind of love. 

It's interesting to note that the Dutch domestic interiors arose during a time of rapid change, global expansion, war, urbanization, commercialization and boom and bust economics--an uncertain time not unlike our own.  It is as if the artists were turning away from the confusion and instability around them in order to find a meditative space, a stable, predictable sanctuary.  Feder and Brown do this as well, but they also allude to the world's turmoil and their own inner disquiet in their paintings. Brown paints an impoverished Kentucky couple standing by a door that opens into their darkened home and, in another painting, herself in an attic, staring down into an abyss.  Most of her deceptively simple interiors have several doors leading to and from darkness.  Feder, too, places us sometimes in the pitch black,  looking through more darkness toward distant lights in empty buildings.  Her portraits of her sons find them asleep behind thick black walls or working in dim light or scratched and abraded. 

The paintings in "Interiors" depict contemplative moments and  peace, but also loneliness.  Brown and Feder suggest that although we may find respite from a threatening world in our shelters and routines, we may never find complete respite from ourselves.  Behind the door or outside the empty commercial building sits darkness.

Rex Brown
Pattern Shop Studio