SHARON LOUDEN

I'm delighted to share some of Sharon Louden's art whose work we first discovered over a decade ago. We walked into one of San Francisco's art galleries where we ended up in the back room trawling through their drawers etc. There we found Sharon's evocative marks -- small gestures but whose luminosity lit up the entire gallery. 

Their charisma is probably not captured well by my iPhone camera. But they did first grab our eye for what they visually are ... only then for me to discover and adore that (according to the gallerist) the works were made after Sharon made one of her huge installation works. In other words, while the marks are deceptively simple, the artist found her way to making them only AFTER first making a much larger work (and if you google for images of Sharon's installation works you will find them multi-layered, smart and pleasingly dense, among other things). So I took the artist's process to be like poetry -- that the poetics underlying the minimalist poem can be encyclopedic in attention even as its manifestation might be a small poem. Anyway, even after over a decade, these works continue to delight with their presence -- thank you, Sharon Louden for your intelligent and compelling work: