User:Wikipelli/Sharon Lyn Stackpole (artist)

Sharon Lyn Stackpole (born 1969 in Pennsylvania) is an American artist, writer, and illustrator. Though she was born in Pennsylvania, she moved to West Virginia when she was four years old and she now considers herself a West Virginian. . ''Stackpole describes her artiistic style as,  "being all over the map". What does it mean? Well, that can vary both in message and depth. Speech recalls a traumatic childhood issue with speaking; thus the overwhelming proliferation of words around a Munch-like foreground figure. The delicate grace of Watery Fish reflects just a love and fascination with aquatic life and environs. In A Moment's Hesitation, the gesture is more enigmatic as if to say, "You, the viewer, must discern the meaning." This is an artist who goes with the flow and follows where she believes the piece wants to take her. To let the piece evolve at its own pace. "I try to get out of my own way and not think too much when I'm in the zone. It's kind of like being a leaf in the river. I'm just going along the current and letting it happen." Which brings up the general discussion of meaning. Do you need an obvious narrative for the art to speak to you? In my experience, I am more often wrong than right in discerning the meaning of a work. That used to confound me, but now I see it as an unexpected surprise and pleasure. When I have the delight of freely wandering a gallery, my pulse quickens as I anticipate that epiphany when a work speaks to me. ''

Biography
Stackpole was born in Pennsylvania, but moved to West Virginia at an early age. She grew up in Middlebourne, West Virginia and graduated from Tyler County High School in 1987. After graduation, she enrolled in Fairmont State University in Fairmont, West Virginia where she majored first in Graphic Communication and, later, changed her major to Art History and Painting. After a year, Sharon left Fairmont for West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV. While there, she studied studied painting and art history under Marian Hollinger.

In 1993, she moved to California. She lived in Sacramento, temporarily before settling in San Francisco. In 1995, she returned to her childhood home in Middlebourne.

Upon her return to her home in West Virginia, Stackpole worked as a newspaper reporter and columnist for the Tyler County Star News (newspaper). . From 1996 - 1998,, she worked as a reporter for the Wheeling, West Virginia News-Register/Intelligencer. Though writing provided her with a creative outlet, she maintains that her primary form of expression was visual, noting, "I always loved art. I was always drawing, it was my way of expressing myself"

Stackpole's work has been shown in galleries in Morgantown and Wheeling, West Virginia. Among these are the Appalachian Gallery, Glow Beauty, Monongalia Arts Center, and Words and Music. She also maintains an online shop, participates in online social media, and works with the Brooklyn Art Library. She has also had work exhibited at several international venues. In 2014 her art was part of a show in Barcelona, Spain. The Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, England, held a charity gala that auctioned off one of her pieces called "Goodbye Girl". Most recently, her work has been part of an exhibition in Skopje, Macedonia

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Stackpole recalled when she started painting professionally, "I started painting again after I had my pacemaker implanted in 2004. I realized I needed to get on with it," she explained. "I went around to businesses asking them if they would show my work; most of them said, 'No.' A business in Charleston finally said yes, but they are not around anymore. It was N'Harmony on Capitol Street in 2006 that got me started."

Stackpole currently resides in Middlebourne. She has three sons, Alex Riley, who is 21 and currently enrolled at Penn State studying Graphic Communications; Ted Stackpole, who is 15 and a freshman at Tyler Consolidated High School; and Ben Stackpole, who is 13 and a seventh grader at Tyler Consolidated Middle School. Her parents are Bill and Emma Brown of Tyler City.

“Work through this,” she wrote on a watercolor of what appears to be a fractured heart. “If only because they would be happy if you stopped. Going forward with dignity is the best revenge.”

A few days earlier, she posted a painting of a woman standing outside what might be a church window.

“Feeling beleaguered? One against the world? On your own? Hell! You must have tried to do something nice for someone,” she wrote in the tweet.

Art is Stackpole’s primary form of communication, and it’s almost always been that way.

She started drawing as a young child.

She went to an “open school,” an educational trend at the time where school buildings did not have separate classrooms, but rather open spaces separated by partitions.

“They thought the kids would learn from each other,” Stackpole said.

But the arrangement didn’t suit Stackpole, who was painfully shy.

“There was so much noise, I had headaches all the time,” she said. “I was lonely. I couldn’t communicate with people.

“But I would draw pictures.”

Drawing became her escape.

She used her art to connect with other students. Sometimes she would make drawings for people; other times she would teach her fellow students how to draw.

“There are so many people who tell me on Facebook, you taught me how to draw when I was little,” Stackpole said.

After high school, Stackpole decided to continue pursuing her art and enrolled at West Virginia University.

Art school was not a good fit, however. The pressure and the competition left her wracked with anxiety and nearly snuffed out her creative ability.

She worried constantly, and worked nonstop. She didn’t eat. More than once she had to go to a clinic for IV fluids.

“I’m a terrible perfectionist. I wanted so much to do well, I couldn’t do anything at all,” she said.

Things did not get better after graduation. For a long time she completely stopped making art. She went to work as a journalist, working as a court reporter and copy editor for The Intelligencer and Wheeling News Register.

“I could not create. I had incredible self-doubt. I literally did not draw. I did not pick up a pencil or draw. I could not say I was an artist,” she said.

The block lasted for almost a decade.

Then in 2004, when she was 35, Stackpole started having serious health problems. Her pulse was dropping dangerously low, causing her to pass out.

She went to a cardiologist, who discovered she had sick sinus syndrome, which means her heart beats too fast or too slow, as well as an atrioventricular block, meaning her heart lacked the electrical impulse needed to keep beating. She had to have surgery to install a pacemaker.

The experience shook something deep inside Stackpole. The health scare forced her to reevaluate the way she was spending her life.

That brush with death forced her to examine why she’d left her first love, art.

“I thought I really need to get on with it,” she said.

One day, she got out a sketchbook and tried to draw, but found it difficult to put anything on the page.

Up until she quit, Stackpole had drawn almost every day of her life. Now, it was like she had forgotten how.

She eventually began to make drawings, but they weren’t very good.

“They were so clumsy,” she said.

But Stackpole persisted.

“Slowly it came back to me and I just broke through. Then I was just on fire,” she said. “It was a torrent. It’s like if you have a closet you’ve shoved everything into and you open the door and it all falls out.”

Hesitantly, she began putting some of her work on Facebook.

After a few months of that, she started loading her boys into the car and driving from store to store, asking if they would exhibit her paintings.

She got turned away time and time again, but eventually started getting into exhibits. She finally got her first major break in 2009 when Chuck Hamsher, owner of the Purple Moon in downtown Charleston, asked if Stackpole would send a few paintings to his store.

“I’ve been showing there ever since,” she said.

And she has continued making art, too.

Every day, as soon as she gets her boys off to school and makes some coffee, Stackpole goes to work ... whether she feels like it or not.

“If I waited to feel like it, I’d never do it,” she said. “It’s become a discipline. I never want to go back to not doing anything.

And while she mostly paints and draws, Stackpole also works in other art forms like sculpture, printmaking and glass work.

“I keep changing it up because I don’t want to get in a rut,” she said.

The Internet has continued to play a large role in her creative process, allowing her to both promote her work and receive feedback from fans.

“You send this stuff out and you don’t know if anyone’s going to see it again. Sometimes it does connect with someone. That’s what matters to me,” she said. “In this age of technology, we need it more than ever. Art is one of the last open, honest dialogues we have. Image is pure concentrate. It’s a form of connection.”

Stackpole has retained some of that shy little girl, however. Even when she attends showings of her own work, she prefers to blend into the background.

“I’m usually hiding. People don’t know I’m there. I love to just sit back and watch everyone else relate to the work,” she said.

- See more at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20141210/DM07/141219890#sthash.iXTrQ00Z.dpuf''

Soft, watery, Impressionistic, veiled, implied, nuanced: these might be descriptions of the art of Sharon Lynn Stackpole.

Exhibitions

 * Paratissima Skopje (Macedonia) June 10-12, 2016
 * “Talismans and Other Acts of Magic,” Sharon Lyn Stackpole and Jennifer Ellifritz, Monongalia Arts Center, Morgantown, WV, May 6-28, 2016
 * Print Exchange: Just A Second, Sketchbook Project, Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, July 17-19, 2015
 * “Explorations: Surrealism and Realism,” Artworks Around Town, Centre Market, Wheeling, Greg Siegwart and Sharon Lyn Stackpole, June 2015
 * Tokyo International Art Fair, Quest Hall, Harajuku, May 22-23, 2015
 * Art All Night, Pittsburgh, PA, April 25-26, 2015
 * “Symmetries,” Monongalia Arts Center, March 6-28, 2015
 * Doctors Without Borders Charity Gala Ball, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, Global Art Agency, January 30, 2015
 * Mail Art Exhibition, “I Dream Of..” Incline Gallery, 766 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA, December 2014
 * Print Exchange 2014, “Just A Second”, Brooklyn Art Library, Brooklyn, NY, December 2014
 * Barcelona International Art Fair, Casa Batllò, Antoni Gaudi Modernist Museum, Barcelona, December 12-13, 2014
 * ArtMares, Contemporary Galleries, October 20-24, 2014, Charleston, WV
 * Morgantown Arts Walk, September 26, 2014, Glow Beauty Lounge, 224 Pleasant Street, Morgantown WV
 * Art is What? Monongalia Arts Center, July 18-August 2, 2014
 * “Return and Other Works“, The Purple Moon, 906 Quarrier Street, Charleston WV, June 26, 2014
 * Pittsburgh Artists Against Fracking, Garfield Artworks, 4931 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, April 4-May 31, 2014
 * “Les Femmes Folles WV” Monongalia Arts Center, March 7-April 5,2014 Featuring art by Julia Cahill, Betsy Cox, Sally Deskins, Claudia Giannini, Bonnie Gloris (image above by Gloris), Breanne Holden, Charlotte Ka, Jane Ogren, Sharon Lyn Stackpole and Jennifer Yerdon Lejeune
 * “Imaginaries” Patty’s Art Spot, Star City, WV, January 2014
 * SCOPE Miami, See.Me, December 2013
 * “Bare Form”, Monongalia Arts Center, November 2013
 * “SHADY: Our Neighbors the Trees“, Arts Monongahela, Oct. 4-28′ 2013
 * Print Exchange 2013, “The Drive Home”, Art House Co-Op, Robert Blackburn Printshop, 323 West 39th St., New York,NY, Sept. 5-29,2013; and July 26-28, 2013 at the Graphic Arts Workshop  in San Francisco, CA.
 * “The Story of the Creative“, See|Exhibition Space, 26-19 Jackson Ave., Long Island City, NY July 25-Sept.10, 2013
 * Global Art League International Exhibition, Montreal, July 20-August 17, 2013
 * “Earth Day Invitational Exhibit“, Apartment Earth Gallery, 223 1/2 Hale St., Charleston, WV April 18, 2013
 * “Starseeds“, with Jacob McGill, Monongalia Arts Center, Morgantown, WV, March 1-30, 2013
 * Twitter Art Exhibit, with Exhale Unlimited Gallery (EU) 953 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA, January 12, 2013
 * “Uncharted Territories,” Shaw Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2012
 * Appalachian Gallery, 270 Walnut Street, Morgantown, WV, September 2012-present
 * “Art Takes Times Square,” Times Square, NYC, in conjunction with Artists Wanted and Chashama, June 2012
 * “Dreams of Chronic Insomniacs,” with Matthew Grandstaff, at Monongalia Arts Center, October 1-30, 2010
 * Bare Form Exhibition, Monongalia Arts Center, 107 High Street, Morgantown WV, November 2009
 * Filters of color, word & light, The Purple Moon: Over the Moon Gallery, February 27-April 15 2009
 * “Hypergraphia” The Blue Moose 248 Walnut Street, Morgantown, WV Nov. 2- Dec. 13, 2008

Galleries

 * The Purple Moon 906 Quarrier St, Charleston, West Virginia
 * The Appalachian Gallery 270 Walnut St, Morgantown, West Virginia
 * Words and Music Bookshop at Stratford Springs 4 Hyde Park Drive, Wheeling, West Virginia
 * Glow Beauty Lounge 224 Pleasant Street Morgantown, West Virginia
 * Monongalia Arts Center Permanent Collection 107 High Street Morgantown, West Virginia
 * Brooklyn Art Library 103A N 3rd St Brooklyn, New York
 * Tyler County Museum and Historical Society Permanent Collection

Illustrations

 * Cynical Rhymes and Lullabies, David Synn Sharon Lyn Stackpole, Illustrator, Cover Design, March 2016
 * Topaz Review, Vol. 1, Issue 2, “Youth and Decay”, June 2013
 * OV Parent Magazine, March 2010, Contributing Artist