Featured Artist Ruth Sharton

Artist Ruth Sharton shares paintings from her “Deeper” series, that focuses abstract imagery that reflects the interconnection between the cosmos and humanity. Visit her website to see more.

 

 

Acrylic on canvas is the medium for my newest series of work, the “Deeper” paintings. I use both abstract and classical painting techniques, which alternates between pouring, splattering and dripping the paint, to a more intentional brushing and blending of paint. While I don’t have a specific image in mind when I begin a “Deeper” painting, I am somewhat rooted in referencing allusions to the natural world of earth, water, sky, and the cosmos.

 

 

I intentionally divide the pictorial space in half to create stasis—an equilibrium—to center the viewer’s focus and evoke a meditative stillness. The horizontal divide also creates an “above/below” dichotomy. The lower half of the space serves as an anchor, suggesting materiality; the upper half is suggestive of the ethereal.

 

 

This pictorial dichotomy also hints at duality and paradox, and the revelation of beauty and harmony inherent in opposing and seemingly contradictory forces, equally inherent in our humanity.

 

 

As the series evolved, I began to sense that I was expressing an interconnectedness which eventually coalesced into this understanding. The foundation of our humanity is our consciousness, and our recognition of the unity between individual and universal consciousness.

 

 

The “Deeper” paintings are meditations on this unity, and contemplate the intrinsic spiritual and energetic connection between the physical matter of our visible world as well as the non-visible realm of the metaphysical.

 

 

While working on this series I came across some images taken by the Hubble telescope, of nebula which are interstellar clouds of dust and gas and are where stars are formed.

 

 

I was intrigued by the luminous, phosphorescent colors of the gas clouds, superimposed over backgrounds of dark space and shimmering stars. It brought to mind the song lyric, “We are stardust…We are billion-year-old carbon,” a lyric corroborated by science as true, as we literally share our organic elements with the stars. I was also reminded of descriptions of visions related by mystics and meditators, who have experienced our earth-bound reality dissolving into a shimmering vibrating energy.

 

 

Science converges with the mystical, as quantum physics implies that our reality is fundamentally a vibrating energy, a field of possibilities, impacted, and potentially directed by, our consciousness.

 

 

The “Deeper” series invites the viewer to become lost, and absorbed, and then found, in its images, and in this essential, inescapable unity.

 

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