An exhibition of paintings by Grace Wilkinson – DREAMY.

Meet the artist Saturday 6th August 4pm for drinks & canapes.

For me the meaning of life is love with a general meaning of agape (Greek) helping each other  in the journey of life. During the lockdown I made this series DREAMY trying to give hope to us during the difficult time. 

The Raw. The Nakid. The True- Sharla La

THE RAW. THE NAKID. THE TRUE   Artist: SHARLA LA

She is raw. She is naked. She is immersed inside her own reality – her vision. This is her truth, her only companions through life. The colours that speak and the textures that move beneath her fingers dance. The image becomes Art!

My artistic narrative is influenced by the solitary transcendent worlds of ‘the spectrum’ i walk through. Each emotion its own entity. Each entity its own waltz.  My work captures the many emotively infused paths dancing through the kaleidoscope that is my life; the eternal  line I walk ‘tween magick and madness.

i am an intensely emotional, insightfully intelligent being, expressing my soul through vibrant colour, using paint, pastel, ink and clay. Identifying with the Instictualism style, it can be said I embrace a more Expressionist ideology, as the inner world is my muse. My lines are bold. My textures painterly. My tones flow but often defy traditional art lore. These attributes signify my artistic voice.

I choose subject matter with themes relevant to the human condition, the soul’s psyche and my inner experience. I love the round dimensions of the human figure, often distorting or extenuating the lines to create impact.  I boldly saturate my colours, mixing my palette, dressing my figures’ flesh with unnatural tones, taking my figures into a fantasy realm, away from the minds eye, far from the eye’s dream, and into the soul’s song, the things only the gut can articulate.

I paint mainly with my fingers, finishing with palette knives, using brushes for details.

Making art. Creating medicine. Daily medicine. Vital for good health. A positive manefestation of my desire to express both realities, internal and external. Nourishing my life force like the food I eat, making art is a daily, a nightly thing, that calls me to feel deeply and express confidently.  My practice speaks in a language the eyes can see, the fingers can touch, yet soundless, without words…there lies my power.

ART. More art. Keep doing. Keep thinking. Keep feeling. Art.  Can always make something beautiful , something enlightened. Something to fill the dark hours..

Look upon my work. Feel something, then go away inspired to confidently express your own souls voice loud and proud. Quiet and intricate. Simple or complex. With a sense of self that speaks as uniquely as your own fingerprint. 

I offer raw. I offer naked. I offer true. Straight from my own heart and soul. My arts voice sings it’s ode. 

Pure emotion is truly the most beautiful, the most intelligent thing in humanity.

Thankyou so much for seeing into my world.

MY DARK ART AND ME

When I google ‘dark feminine art’ hundreds of images of sexy beautiful slim and well-dressed young unscarred unblemished dressed in fashionable mystic or steam punk clothing with long flowing perfectly wild hair appear…. but finding true wild, deeply raw, or accurate to the experience of dark emotion based feminine is something one must dig deeper to find. i try so many variations and sub-headings in my search. Yet time and again, the subject matter is clean, is pretty despite a scream or an aggressive yet somehow sexy or alluring expression. 

Over whelming, the subjects are easy to look at and attractive, inspiring, or passively fragile and vulnerable; again, sensual.

 A patriarchal viewpoint, much?

This is not true female emotion. No one looks sexy when they are in the depths of their true darkness. No one is simply demure and sensuous inside fragility. When we are so spent that our energy is mute, we are most often accompanied by an instinctual alertness, an over sensitivity that will growl or cry or debate like a demon on ice! Even in our mute spent numbness times, our beings are in survival mode, and utterly unsexualised unless sexualisation is the key to survival, to maintaining ground, to staying afloat to receiving help, to save face.

These emotions are not dressed in tight corsets or leather and lace, do not have soft flowing hair, and are not standing like Kali fearlessly holding just the right weapon taking just the right step forward while singing in perfect pitch just the right antidote. These emotions are raw, are awkward, are clumsy and soaked in stains of blood, tears, determination, wrath, and often inarticulate abandonment while our souls are draped in ill matched rags or self-sewn cloaks wrapped around our naked fragilities for the safety our own stitch brings.

 We have ungroomed vaginas, bruised skin or rain-streaked unwashed hair fallen from a crawling scalp and we smell like baby vomit or period pain or crones rotten toothless breath! This description may not be our literal state of being, but it sure as hell is how emotion feels!

Our voices quake, our hands shake. The adrenaline to fight, to force to protect to direct to survive to revive, to escape, to validate, to be wanted to be trusted to know we are safe without having to fight for it to race for it, to just be able to share it and hold it and be seen in all our shades, dark and light, progressive or conservative, outwards or inwards…all there…but these expressions are not a list or a lineal line of things to achieve.

It is an instinctual dance, not a logical pre-determined march into battle. These emotions are a kaleidoscope, ever changing, evolving, regressing, switching as each moments evolves and switches, as each thought takes the emotions into another place of understanding, hindsight. Foresight. Left of sight. Right of sight. And all the angles between…then inside the moment. Then outside mutable moments all within one breath!

She screams, and her voice cracks and croaks, her eyes are swollen and puffy, her nose runs with snot and her face is sweating as every crease every line etches into her heart just that little bit deeper. She is not controlled by some higher force, goddess like or otherwise. She is driven by what is gnarling inside her, turning over and over in thought and feeling, like the two are interbred, intertwined, no beginning no end. And even the most prettiest of women, will turn ugly; haunted, in these moments and her composure, her ‘warrior’ is not dressed for battle or performance…she is naked, she is wrapped in tattered skin that breaths fury or fear or strength or instinctual forces that just know things. She is seething, she is seering inside emotional intelligence and fuming inside the lines between reaction and action. She is in her truth! Unmasked, unchained, and unearthed!

Show me real women inside art! Show me the art inside real women. All women are real. All women are art.

People are uncomfortable seeing real women inside art. They do not mind seeing men contorted and old, wrinkled, and unattractive, but women must be dressed up to seem seemingly.

I spit on this cover up to our truth! How vile the coat that disguises true emotions naked skin and insists on our emotional bodies being covered in make-up just to hide the fact that when we bleed its messy, it has a stench and it hurts like pain should!

I strive to unmask the great feminine. To find her face as she grieves, to express her bones and her flesh inside the story all women know….inside the privacy of our ugly, of our fear, of our fragility and of our survival.

Show me a woman’s flesh, and I will show you things that flow in the blood of every sistar under the moons breast.

The Raw. The Nakid. The True – Sharla La

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Level 1, 259 Riley St, Surry Hills NSW 2010