A native New Yorker, Sharon Reeber is an artist and art historian in the Kansas City, Missouri area. Her work in painting, mixed media, and printmaking draws from a variety of sources, including observation of the natural environment, world landscape painting and mandala traditions, and color theories. She was recently honored to receive a Morris Graves Foundation Artist Residency and has traveled and studied in Europe and Asia. Her work is included in corporate and private collections in the U.S. and Europe, including Kaiser-Permanente (Kansas City) and Gleiss-Lutz (Stuttgart) and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibits. Reeber currently teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. She holds an M.A. from the University of Missouri – Kansas City and B.A. from Tufts University, and studied art history at the Eberhard-Karls Universitaet in Tuebingen, Germany. Her scholarly writing on German modernism has been published in international journals in Germany and China.
Statement
Each work begins with an experience or perception, and strives for a revelation of that experience. To accomplish this I take bits of the observed natural world and re-arrange them, re-color them, and re-shape them until they resonate with a satisfying energy and sense of balance. I am interested in circles as organizing principle, metaphor, and visual structure, which has led me to explore mandalas. I am also intrigued by implying progression in the fourth dimension, time, within a static image.
The inherently abstract quality of music informs the way I think visually. Color and music overlap in my mind, creating wordless joy. The visual worlds I invent are ultimately metaphors for spiritual perceptions.