Sherry Wacker

Horsepowered Memories, airbrushed images combined with car parts from past years is my latest series. My goal as an artist is to strike a universal chord. I create works that are about the world I grew up in and the one I am witnessing now. I want to make people feel exploded with memories and then think about how these events relate to what we have become. And that is where cars came into my mind as a vehicle to take us there. Growing up in America cars took us on our life’s journey. A family vacation, a first kiss, a coming of age story spring to mind. I take the ignition that comes from a car and expand the memory to a larger history that we tend to forget. 

Creative thinking has been the core of me. I was fortunate to receive training at some excellent schools starting with the Maryland Institute of Art at the age of eight. I graduated from the University of Maryland and became a teacher to practice my theory that success in art carries into other areas of learning.  I earned a MS in Technical Education at Cal State East Bay.

As an art teacher for York College PA, I learned computer skills so that I could bring my students into an employable space in the job market. This coincided with a turn in my life that created a need for better income and health care. I jumped into computer gaming, making the screens for the first Monday Night Football PC Game for ABC. I trained myself to do web design with the help of some generous programers at that company. This led me to California as the first web designer for Kaiser Permanente.

Before coming to California I showed in galleries in Baltimore, Georgetown, Harrisburg, and Annapolis. I illustrated magazine covers and ads for newspapers in Washington, Baltimore, Gettysburg and Harrisburg. I also did illustration for various New York publishers working under SI International as my rep.

In our very busy lives few of us have the kind of time to focus solely on our art the way I have for the past few years. When I was teaching I imparted the same principle Malcolm Gladwell writes about with his “10000 Hour Rule.” Practice for 10000 hours and you will become an outlier. I have put in my 10000 hours practicing drawing, painting, sculpture and airbrush. Now I plan on producing many new works to make that practice pay.