Sharmon Davidson

I think I must have been born an artist. My earliest clear memory is of sitting at a table at age two, happily making pictures.  As a child, I drew and cut out my own paper princesses, knights, horses and dragons. I made ‘people’ out of natural materials such as sticks and apples, clothing them with flowers and housing them in villages of moss and clay. That passion for creating has remained the core of who I am, and the driving force in my life.

I'm able to recognize threads of connection stretching through time from my childhood to the work I’m making now.  One of those threads is the largely intuitive way my work is created; I have learned to give up some of the control and allow chance to play a part. Adapting my original idea to what emerges from the interplay of intention and intuition forces me to expand my vision and to grow in new directions as an artist. Whatever the medium, my process involves gradually building up layers of various materials such as oil-based printing inks, watercolor, acrylic ink, and colored pencil and collage to synthesize a unified whole from the parts. This type of process feels most natural to me, and yields a luminosity and brilliance that satisfy me.

The images are formed from the vocabulary of symbols that I’ve developed as I sought to express the theme that lies at the foundation of it all: a deep belief in the unity and interconnection of everything in the universe.  Related to this is my conviction that every part of the earth is sacred, including the myriad beings that ride it through space. At the most basic level, we are made of the same stuff as the stars, the trees, the air, the ocean.  Having come from the same source, we are all connected in the most intricate ways, both visible and invisible.  This belief is expressed by the transposition of objects, the overlapping of transparent images, and by forms that seem to become something else.  I'm constantly searching for more effective methods of revealing this mystery.