SHARON BOOMA THE SPACE BETWEEN
The Space Between SHARON BOOMA
September 27 - October 21 . 2024
I tend to view a certain painting by artist Sharon Booma as a landscape. But no landscape features—mountains, trees, rivers, or stars in the nighttime sky—exist on this canvas to say it is so, save a dark band of color across the top, where linear and letter-like shapes dart about like sky writing on a distant horizon. The pale “terrain,” that takes up most of the composition below this black band, has no attributes to discern. No rocks, houses, forests, or streams. It’s an amorphic field, a liquid landscape, like the atmosphere of some alien moon. I see two figures, one on the left, the other on the right, engaged in some activity. A ritual, perhaps, or a ceremony. But they have no bodies that resemble those of real people and they have no faces. They are rectangular, vertical, and geometric but also imperfect, their blocky components bleeding into each other like swaths of paint gone over with a wide brush or palette knife while still wet.
But all of this is projection on my part. The painting is nonobjective. Yet the title remains redolent of one that could easily belong to a landscape or a nocturne: The Creek Sings No Lullaby.
Some place inside the dreaming mind—a place of subconscious hopes, fears, and desires—is what’s in dialogue with the consciousness mind here. These figures in the landscape aren’t necessarily figures on the landscape at all. But they could be. In a way, they both are and are not. As in all her recent paintings, these shapes give expression to what lies between: between the conscious and the subconscious,
between dark and light, between creation and destruction, and between shapelessness and form.
“I don’t start with a drawing or some kind of set form,” says the Florida-based painter, who works intuitively. “I just have to roll with it.”
Even in her recent paintings A Silent Aftermath, An Earlier Dialogue III, and Wait, a suggestion of objecthood teases with shapes that invite real-world comparisons. In the first painting, A Silent Aftermath, a shape like a boat on muted blue waters, floats above a wiry tangle, bright with drops of bloodlike red paint, and appearing like the boat’s ominous shadow or its inverse. In the latter composition, Wait, objecthood lies not so much in painted forms that lie on the edge (or space) between representationalism and abstraction, but in a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of being inside a domestic space, in the dark, surrounded by one’s things, watching the pale and somber world beyond through an open window.
None of those things are in the painting.
Booma never sets out to capture the physical appearance of things in the material world. But a memory that might be triggered by some external sight, or a feeling evoked by a time of day, these are fair game.
“Different shapes appear almost by accident,” Booma says. “Sometimes these accidents are more beautiful, more
unexpected, or more appropriate than anything I could have invented myself. You just have to submit to where the painting is going.”
“When I start, I might have been influenced by something I saw in nature—a color combination, or something industrial. I start with maybe a little teeny inkling of an idea, but I’ve got to take a chance and play with that to create, then be willing to destroy what I’ve started.”
In Booma’s case, destruction is as important to the creative process as creation itself. Whether working in acrylics, oils, or with cold wax, creation involves adding layers, which she applies using brayers, wide brushes, and squeegees to push the paint around. A given painting may include poured paint, washes, silkscreened elements, or collage.
But in scraping these layers away, by etching into the cold wax or painted surface, for instance, which uncovers paintedover layers, she offers us a glimpse into the painting’s history, which adds to its sense of depth.
“There can be many iterations of a painting before I decide to let it go,” she says. “Sometimes you have to be willing to destroy things or ideas that no longer serve you and create room for new ones that really move you. I have to dig deeper, and I keep questioning further. Where is that real dialogue? It’s the space between the surface and what is underneath.”
Booma grew up in Massachusetts and studied at the University of Connecticut, School of Fine Arts, from where she graduated summa cum laude, and the College of New Rochelle in New York. As a student, studio work included painting from models and rendering still-lifes from real-life objects, but Booma always leaned toward abstraction.
“Even then, I would take work home from college over break. But I would not have the still-life in front of me so, I would finish it up in an abstract manner. I found it more challenging.”
But as far as they reach into non-objective abstraction, something anchors her paintings in the present, in that sacred exchange between art and observer that can only happen in the moment. For some, like me, drawn to forming narratives of some type or another, to deducing hidden meanings, and making allusions, there’s an endless well of ambiguity that gives storytelling ample room. For someone who experiences a work of art as a feeling, as something undefinable in words, as the best representation of their own abstract emotions and thoughts, they resonate too.
The diptych Glimpsed Across Time, for instance, captures the feeling of a place as it exists in one’s memory, or in a hopeful dream. The dominant color of the dusky pastel blue rectangle that dominates the composition is framed on all sides by pale white, tinged here and there with yellow ochre. Two black areas, faint or faded, one larger than the other, give an impression of figures moving towards a single boxlike splotch of black, which occupies the lower right corner.
But, again, real-world comparisons come creeping in, into a realm that lies outside our world of empirical, observable phenomena and fact. You may say a painting has its own story to tell, but sometimes it’s merely trying to express an emotion. Maybe not even that. Maybe a painting won’t give up its mysteries without a struggle, if at all.
“The painting has a life of its own,” Booma says. “I just try to let it come through. When I’m kind of like in the painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a sort of get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I can’t let myself have fears about making changes. You have to let the painting reveal itself.”
—Michael Abatemarco
Click on Images in this Catalog to Inquire
A Shifting Evening, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on canvas
60 x 48 x 2.50 in.
A Silent Aftermath, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on canvas 60 x 48 x 2.50 in.
An Earlier Dialogue I, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 x 2.50 in.
An Earlier Dialogue II, 2024 Acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 x 2.50 in.
An Earlier Dialogue III, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 x 2.50 in.
Call and Response,
2024 Oil & wax on canvas 48 x 48 x 2.50 in.
Gathering Outside the Gates, 2024
Oil & wax on canvas
60 x 60 x 2.50 in.
Intentions, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on canvas
60 x 60 x 2.50 in.
Scattered Sounds, 2024 Oil & wax on panel
60 x 48 x 2.25 in.
Stand in the Midst, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on canvas 72 x 72 x 2.25 in.
Glimpsed Across Time (diptych), 2024
Oil & wax on panel
36 x 96 x 2 in.
The Creek Sings No Lullaby, 2024
Oil & wax on canvas
60 x 60 x 2.50 in.
Unseen Bravery, 2024 Oil & acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 x 2.50 in.
Wait, 2024
Oil & wax on canvas on panel
48 x 48 x 2 in.
Wait Here, 2024 Oil & wax on canvas on panel 48 x 48 x 2 in.
Words Had Been Claimed, 2024
Oil & wax on panel
72 x 60 x 2.50 in.
Ran Beneath Each Hour, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on canvas 72 x 72 x 2.50 in.
Untamed and Loud, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on panel
72 x 60 x 2.25 in.
All This Way. All This Time., 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on panel 72 x 60 x 2.25 in.
Before Words, 2024
Oil, acrylic & wax on panel
48 x 48 x 2.50 in.
Quietly Yours, 2024 Oil, acrylic & wax on canvas
48 x 36 x 1.50 in.
Intent and Focused I, 2024 Oil, acrylic & mixed media on paper 30 x 22 in.
Intent and Focused II, 2024 Oil, acrylic & mixed media on paper 30 x 22 in.
Intent and Focused III, 2024 Oil, acrylic & mixed media on paper 30 x 22 in.
Solo Exhibitions
2020 Caldwell Snyder, San Francisco, CA
2016 Caldwell Snyder, San Francisco, CA
Etienne Gallery, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
2015 Anderson O’Brien Fine Art, Omaha, NE
2014 Campton Gallery, New York, NY
2013 Etienne Gallery, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
Olson Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
Edwards Trust Lectureship and Show, San Angelo, TX
2012 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2011 Anderson O’Brien Gallery, Omaha, NE
2010 LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
Campton Gallery, New York, NY
2009 Etienne Gallery, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
Arden Gallery, Boston, MA
2008 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Caldwell Snyder Gallery, St. Helena, Napa Valley, CA
2007 Campton Gallery, New York, New York
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
Anderson O’Brien Fine Art, Omaha, NE
2006 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Caldwell/Snyder, San Francisco, CA
Arden Gallery, Boston, MA
2005 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, New York, NY
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
Anderson O’Brien Fine Art, Omaha, NE
2004 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2003 Anderson O’Brien Fine Art, Omaha, NE
2002 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
2000 Anderson O’Brien Fine Art, Omaha, NE
LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Group Exhibitions
2020 San Francisco Art Fair
2019 San Francisco Art Fair
2016 35th Anniversary Show, Etienne Gallery, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
2014 30 x 30 Anniversary Exhibition, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA
PAN Amsterdam, Helvoirt, The Netherlands
2010 ZomerExpo, Etienne Gallery, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
2009 Art Fair's Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
2007 Los Angeles Art Show (exhibited by LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM) at Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, CA
Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL
2005 Jules Place, Boston, MA
U.S. Embassy Residence in Vatican City, The Holy See Small Works, LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
2004 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Ameringer & Yohe, Boca Raton, FL
Jules Place, Boston, MA
2003 Harvard Spring Exhibition, Boston, MA
Ameringer & Yohe, Boca Raton, FL
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
Hayden Gallery, Lincoln, NE
2002 Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
2001 Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE
LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Hayden Gallery, Lincoln, NE
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
1999 Hayden Gallery, Lincoln, NE
Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
Anderson O’Brien Gallery, Omaha, NE
Hillmer Gallery, Omaha, NE
Marxhausen Gallery, Concordia University, Seward, NE
1998 Olson/Larsen Gallery, West Des Moines, IA
Anderson O’Brien Gallery, Omaha, NE
1997 Anderson O’Brien Gallery, Omaha, NE
Bemis Gallery, Omaha, NE
1996 Anderson O’Brien Gallery, Omaha, NE
1995 John Slade Ely House, New Haven, CT - Invitation IV, Curator’s Choice
1994 Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, CT
Silvermine Gallery, New Canaan, CT – Art of the Northeast, Top Award in Painting
Tom’s Price Gallery, Wheaton, IL
1993 Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, CT
John Slade Ely House, New Haven, CT – Connecticut Women Artists Award
Salt Box Gallery, West Hartford, CT
Tom’s Price Gallery, Wheaton IL
Graphic Source Gallery, Barrington, IL
1992 Norris Cultural Arts Center, St. Charles, IL
1990 The Creamery Gallery, Geneva, IL
The Connecticut Gallery, Marlborough, CT
1989 Essex Art Association, Essex, CT – Award in Painting
Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, Hartford, CT
The Connecticut Gallery, Marlborough, CT
1988 Artworks Gallery, Hartford, CT
Essex Art Association, Essex, CT – Award in Painting
MS Gallery, Hartford, CT
William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT
Salt Box Gallery, West Hartford, CT
1987 Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, CT
Guilford Fortieth Annual Juried Exhibition, Guilford, CT
John Slade Ely House, New Haven, CT
Ms Gallery, Hartford, CT
Essex Art Association, Essex, CT
Atrium Gallery, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, Hartford, CT
1986 Essex Art Association, Essex, CT – Award in Painting Gallery One, Nantucket, MA
John Slade Ely House, New Haven, CT
Marlborough Arts Gallery, Marlborough, CT – Best in Show, Top Painting Award
Selected Bibliography
2008 Albuquerque Journal/Journal Santa Fe, March 21, 2008 Santa Fean Magazine, February/March, 2008
2007 Studio International (interview), August, 2007
Art in America, March, 2007
Art News, March, 2007
2006 Art News, Summer, 2006
Albuquerque Journal / Journal Santa Fe, March 3, 2006
2005 Art in America, September, 2005
2002 The Art of Seeing, by Paul Zelanski and Mary Fisher, 5th ed., Prentice Hall Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, May 16, 2002
Education
University of Connecticut, School of Fine Arts, summa cum laude College of New Rochelle, New York
