Ah... Paris

Paris, France... "A tamed and familiar land, as comfortable as an old espadrille" or perhaps not, as Graham Robb suggests in his recently released history, Discovering France. At the heart of the locale exists a fundamental paradox where the place's perceived appearance - formed by generations of tourists savouring cafes, charcuteries and connoisseurship - belies its rawness and grunt, the latter being the France of discovery by earlier explorers and travellers.

At what point though does one shift from the stages of explorer, traveler and tourist to beyond, to become woven into a place's fabric? It is a question underpinning Wendy Sharpe's enquiry in her current body of paintings, Paris.

It takes seconds to fall in love with her cluster of tiny canvases living and breathing every nuance of the city via relaxed, sensuous mark making. Surface scuffs and frissons of paint pulse with the city's field of expressions while more extravagant conversations evolve with the four metre canvases. They stretch to an evocative survey of Parisian life where mood is delivered by swatches of moving colour. Distorting the real in a way not dissimilar to real estate ads, these panoramas survey then close in with a fish eye lens retaining their integrity as Sharpe's signature expressive style whisks them into shape.

It is as if the whole of Paris, Sharpe's Paris, were caught in a moment of suspended animation, as if she the onlooker were committed to being more than a tourist, more than a someone passing through who does this looking, this painting for pleasure.

A regular traveller to the city of lights, she recently spent three months over the European Autumn/Winter as a recipient of the AGNSW Denise Hickey Studio. Exactly 20 years earlier, Sharpe as a precocious emerging painter, had been awarded the same studio. This time, as a mid career artist, she notes,

"I was much more able to shift easily from the enclosure of the Cite, its comfort ability and security to beyond, to where I could absorb the ambience, capture the moment, the strange juxtapositions of tourists in places, the gestures of Paris's people, the ways all different types were all squashed in."

That said, the luxury of space and time, afforded in the provision of a studio, kick started arguably Sharpe's finest painting to date.

The viewer too shares in this process. He or she becomes a person looking at an artist looking at someone. Sharpe, as the one looking and creating, captures then an aesthetic distance and herein lies the key to her work. It is grounded in a fundamental paradox, as if to mirror the paradox of Paris itself, the sacred end of culture and the profane end of an old espadrille.

Wendy Sharpe, whether painting about artist's studios, art schools, militia on missions, lovers in studios, cafes or tourists, is curious about the romance of art, the romantic perceptions about its practice, its making, but never does she doubt it is work, seriously hard work. This is what affords this independent traveller an integrity over time and a well deserved success in the annals of Australian art.

Courtney Kidd

*Graham Robb, (I) The Discovery of France(l), Norton & Co, 2007

*Courtney Kidd is a Sydney based art consultant and writer.

The website of Artist Wendy Sharpe - Copyright © 2008 Wendy Sharpe