Her actual studio is an old warehouse, cold in winter, she says, spacious and far less cluttered than the gallery replica. Every Friday, for the life of the exhibition, Sharpe will be in residence and painting a blank mural on a nearby wall and visitors are invited to observe.
Wendy Sharpe in her St Peters studio. Credit: John Fotiadis
Next door, the finalists of this year’s Archibald Prize are being hung to be unveiled for the announcement of the Packing Room Prize this Thursday. Sharpe entered with a self portrait.
In Spellbound, opening on Saturday, paintings are either big or tiny. On one wall is a collection of miniatures in frames Sharpe has collected from Parisian flea markets and Sydney junk shops. These are “personal gifts of magic” to fit the hand, but Sharpe prefers painting big and bold.
“I like them to be strong. I want them to be painterly,” Sharpe says. “I don’t want them to look like they’ve been laboured over which often means you have to paint the same thing over and over again until it’s right. It needs to feel that it happened without strain, and it all has to work.”
With an autobiographical element to much of her work, Sharpe appears in many of them. “Even when the female figures don’t look like me, I feel like the artists I paint might be playing me in a movie,” she says. “So it’s still a bit of me, it’s a sort of alter ego thing.”
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Sharpe is particularly fascinated by fate and chance, and the crossroad decisions people make; the alternative lives we never get to live. She comes from a long line of female psychics, her great-aunt Ann a famous mystic of her day.
It’s not unusual to see ghosts and monsters and shards of memories and imagination floating in the background of her major works. Monsters were the subject of her degree in fine arts at the University of NSW, and they reappear - a green one with many bosoms looking deliberately like cupcakes with cherries on top.
Sharpe quotes the Italian artist Sandro Chia: “Art is a monster – you don’t know where it comes from or indeed what it is exactly, but as an artist, you have the responsibility of entering the labyrinth and bringing back its head.”
“Isn’t it good?” she says. “It describes the creative process. You do have a pretty good idea [where you are heading], but you don’t know exactly.
“If you did know exactly you wouldn’t want to do it. I would not want to paint if I was dutifully copying something. You’ve got an idea, and then it’s a matter of finding your way through the labyrinth.”
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