Address: Central Islip, New York

E-mail: shabou@optonline.net

Sharon works in a primarily abstract style, with occasional elements of surrealism. Her work is influenced by Constructivist art, African abstractions, and the products of animist religious beliefs.

She has studied drawing at the Art Institute of Boston; illustration, design and computer graphics at Pratt Institute; etching at the Ruth Leaf Studio; and collographs and etching with Otto Neals at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop.

She exhibits in group shows, primarily on Long Island, New York, including the African American Museum, the Islip Art Museum, the Graphic Eye Gallery (invitational), Guild Hall and Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton. Other venues include galleries in Ossining and Mount Kisco, Westchester; the Meisner Gallery in Soho, the Art Center of Northern New Jersey, the Alder Gallery in Eugene, Oregon, and online briefly at artnet.com. Sharon exhibited her work in a solo show at the Lakeview Library, Rockville Centre, NY. She has provided cover art for two volumes of poetry.

A writer as well as a visual artist, Sharon has published poems in various literary magazines and four anthologies (Understanding the New Black Poetry, Celebrations, Children of Promise and Songs of Seasoned Women), ;lus non-fiction in the annual journal Collages & Bricolages.

Currently Sharon is a member of the Graphic Eye Gallery in Port Washington, NY, the East End Arts Council, Center for Book Arts and Woman Made Gallery.

There is a battle within me as to what kind of art to make. It is always waged between the same two tendencies of realism and abstraction, and abstraction or non-objective art almost always prevails. It is as if I were helpless to choose anything else. I surrender to a kind of spirit world that wants to manifest itself through the materials I use, the paper, paint, printer's ink, or digial screen.

I sew etchings together as if to make a cloth, and it is as if that cloth existed before, in an earlier time, with other images, but with the same spirit.

When living creatures appear in my work, they appear as spirits, with those creatures' stillness, movement, or attitude, but not their actual bodily forms. They seem, to me, to reveal themselves from the inside out.

When I make art, what calls me is the metaphysical, the infinite, the awesome, the sublime. This is what I seek, and if I approach even only the outer perimeters, it is art that has led me there. -Sharon Bourke