Recent Work

Venice

In the European autumn of 2009, when the weather was unusually warm, Wendy Sharpe took an apartment being offered for rent by a professor of music. The Venice apartment was brilliantly located. From its windows, Sharpe could see the eternal beauty of the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge.

Using the apartment as her home and sometime studio, Sharpe spent an uninterrupted month as a free wanderer in the ancient city of Canaletto and Guardi. Venice was not new to Sharpe, and the familiarity born of earlier trips allowed her to settle quickly into a routine. Using all her senses, she explored everything - the bustling tourist sites where cameras clicked and maps were pored over, and the quiet back streets where every corner presented a fresh visual delight. She studied the Tintoretto paintings in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.

She spent entire days in a corner of the Piazza San Barnaba, observing the ebb and flow of the city and its people and making jottings in gouache. "I could see gondoliers trying to chat up tourists, little bridges, a cafe, a church. It was kind of a microcosm of a whole lot of things," Sharpe says. "I would walk there with gouache and water containers, and work all day. Spending a whole day sitting in a place like that, you get a real understanding of how it works."

All the gouaches in this exhibition were done on location during the day, or in the evening in the professor's apartment. The oil paintings were done on Sharpe's return to her St Peters studio in Sydney, where she wove her still-fresh memories and sensations into a series of canvases which vibrate with the richness and intensity of her Venetian experiences.

Looking at the paintings, we are unmistakably in Venice, but it is not a historical relic we see. It is a boisterous, jostling city as experienced through Sharpe's uniquely panoptic vision, where tourist sites provide a Renaissance backdrop to the ephemera of modern artistic life - a pair of sunglasses, an overturned coffee mug, a Venetian mask, a postcard of St Mark's, discarded sketches and a pair of bright orange shoes.

But in this feast of colour, it is a modestly sized gouache on paper which holds the key to what Sharpe has achieved in her epic depiction of one of the most painted and photographed cities in the world. Titled Self Portrait with St Mark's, it is a night-time study in lurid highlights that blaze under an inky sky. The people and the pigeons have all left the famous Piazza San Marco, and the artist stands alone but resolute in front of the famous cathedral, her drawing paper clutched under one arm. Behind her head, the domes and arches of St Marks resemble a monumental, glowing tiara.

Sharpe, having discovered the city with her feet and all her senses, has crowned herself with the jewel of Venice. It is not just the look of Venice that Sharpe gives us n this body of work, it is the smell, the sound and the feel of it, as well.

Elizabeth Fortescue
Visual arts writer, Daily Telegraph, Sydney