Sharika Roland

Every artist paints one thing. It may take on lots of different looks but it is one thing. The thing picks you, really. I paint what I like to look at and nothing else. I only paint basically a few faces over and over. Everything I need to say is in those same faces. Everything I need to see is in those few faces. Look at Bonnard. he painted the same people over and over. Of course Modigliani did too. When you find it you are done looking and then you spend the rest of your life  painting that one thing. One idea. the idea that haunts you every day. The idea that you love becomes your constant friend. I try and look at my work objectively but I cannot. it is a part of me and it is my style and how I breath and I cannot change it nor do I want to. The look is my whole life in a few brush strokes.

Someone came into the studio the other day and said Oh you do portraits .and they are all the same person. Well I guess so. At first I was thinking she was not a very astute person but the more I think about it, the more I think she is right. And perhaps that is the way it should be. I think each artist gets one gift of one painting and you spend forever painting it, over and over and you never get tired of it.

Do you get tired of looking at your best friends face? I don’t think so.

The relationship between the gallery owner and the artist is a delicate one. The artist has to trust that the gallery is not selling her work for more than she is saying. She has to trust that the gallery will not spend her cut of the sale before she gets it. She has to trust that the checks will always clear.

Some galleries have gone under and have absconded with both money due the artist and kept artwork. This happened in Portland recently. The Lawrence Gallery in Portland did that. An acqaintance of mine had many thousands of dollars owed him and they were unable to be reached.

If I owned a gallery I would treat my artists with great respect as they are the reason I have a sale in the first place. And artists are not a dime a dozen like everyone thinks. Each one is unique and nobody will ever be like them again. WE have a life that is not just learned but born into.

I don’t even know the future of galleries with the advent of the internet. I could sell off my website out of my house if I wanted to. It is not like it used to be- where the gallery had all power and you were lucky to be in their hallowed halls.

People overcome many horrible things in this life. They overcome physical and mental problems. They overcome defeat after defeat in their personal life. and go on to try again. They are the overcomers and they are what this country was built on. That drive to keep going even though it looks pretty bad.

I just spent some time at Soap Lake hiking around the rocky hills. I was contemplating the pioneers coming across terrain just like that with a covered wagon and a couple of kids. It was hard just walking up the hill. The rocks kept moving and you do a slip and slide part way up. The hills kept going up. wild roses were coming up. Don’t grab them to hang on. Branches broke and you would slide down the hill again.

My brother held my hand and pulled me up and kept saying. We are almost to the top. Who held the hand of the lead person on the wagon train? I kept thinking about them. After they got across the whole country they had to build a house from nothing with hardly anything and then chisel out a life.

Oh Pioneer, what stuff you were made of. the stuff of life. We have it so easy in comparison. But the one thing that we can never never overcome is our mind. the minute we think we cannot go on. we cannot. We only have imagined obstacles now. We do not have a river to cross physically with a couple of ox and your whole family must come across that river with you. People feel sorry for themselves to much now. Back 150 years ago nobody had time to feel sorry for themselves. They were too busy living. and getting incredibly strong.

The ability to dazzle has three ingredients:

1. You have to dazzle yourself first and do what you did not know you could do;
2. The dazzled must be familiar with your old work or it will just seem normal; and
3. The mystery ingredient.

There was one painting at my art opening in Seattle that garnered the most attention. It was Pearls. with in the first two hours of the show opening 5 people had expressed interest in buying it. Why? I dazzled them.

It was the first of the series and the first time I used gold so much in a painting. It had sumi black all over it which is a color I never used before and it turned out gorgeous and mysterious at the same time. It was also the first to have a story written on the side of the painting. It was a breakthrough painting and everyone knew it . Even those who had never seen my work before. It was a perfect painting, and it was the first perfect painting of the series.  Therefore it had the most power.

The first one is always the best. then you just try and recreate it. then it is instantly not as good as the first one. You have to keep reinventing yourself every single day to keep fresh. You cannot get good at what you do or you will be a hack. You can feel hack.

Every once in awhile you will do a painting without knowing all the places it will go. It has to paint itself. no ego allowed. Then you can dazzle.

You can do anything you can think up. Do you think that is true?  Well it is. You just have to figure it out. You don’t even need to know all the steps. Just start moving in that direction.

People get paralyzed in one spot and think something has to happen first. You need to get enough money or time or the right person must find you. Forget it. You have the ability to move. Look at Joni Erikson Tada. She is really paralyzed and look at what she managed to do, Most of us are only paralyzed in our minds. You only have to look in the direction of where you want to go and you will start going there. Like a constantly moving line, our minds just start going there.

So don’t look at bad things because you cannot look without going there. You might think “OH I am just being realistic.” Oh yeah, you just made yourself go there.

I had this dream last night. The dream was about a man who came up to me and said, “Everything you need is right here. You don’t have to go searching all over. Everything is right here.  Just look and you will find it.”

Well that is true.