Featured Artist Sharon Abbott-Furze

Artist Sharon Abbott-Furze presents a stunning collection of paintings that capture light and natural elements in her distinctive style. Learn more by visiting her website.

 

 

The Pacific Coast is not a backdrop for my work. It is the work.

 

 

I have been consumed by art since childhood. At ten years old I carved a teepee, a figure, and a horse into the shingles of our roof and got in serious trouble. Years later, my father told me he wished he’d saved those shingles and framed them.

 

 

My first paintings were done entirely with a palette knife, thick and physical, the paint piling up in ways that felt alive. That instinct—toward texture, toward the mark that has presence—has never left me.

 

 

Water is one of my primary subjects. I am equally drawn to people: to faces, gestures, the stories they carry without words. Both pull me for the same reason. Neither holds still, and both carry more emotion than they can quite contain.

 

 

I work in oil on linen with brush, palette knife, and whatever else the painting asks for. I build with transparent layers that carry light rather than block it, and I mix chromatic grays from complementary pigments to keep shadows warm and alive.

 

 

I am, at heart, an expressionist—experimental, responsive, reaching less for what a place looks like than for what it feels like in my body. Dramatic light is the common thread. The moment it shifts, breaks through, or retreats, and everything it touches becomes charged with meaning.

 

 

My process is intuitive and improvisational within structure. Strong values first—then I stay open to the unexpected mark, the accident that reveals something truer than what I planned.

 

 

I represent myself directly, selling through my website and through social media. When someone lives with one of my paintings, I want to know them. That relationship matters as much to me as the work itself. I am a member of the American Impressionist Society and Oil Painters of America. My work has been recognized by BoldBrush, exhibited in Cannon Beach, published in Rain magazine, and featured in the Street of Dreams in Portland, Oregon.

 

 

I paint because I have to, chasing the moment light breaks through and everything it touches feels like freedom.

 

Sharon Abbott-Furze invites you to follow on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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