The Interplay of Energy and Ephemeral Beauty
The journey of Sharon Paster (Instagram: @sharonpaster) as a painter unfolds like a story both familiar and entirely her own—an artist who stepped away from her craft for decades, only to return with a sharpened sense of vision and purpose. Based in Northern California, she creates semi-abstract oil paintings that capture more than just landscapes; they distill fleeting energy into still form. Her work leans into contrasts—layering fluid space with solid accents, clarity with ambiguity—to evoke the restless exchange of energy that pulses through the natural world. From shimmering waterlines to shifting skies, Paster’s pieces are never static. They hover on the edge of motion, inviting viewers into an ongoing moment.
Paster’s technique is as dynamic as her subject matter. She works almost exclusively with oil pigment sticks, a medium that allows for an intuitive and immediate application. These sticks enable her to blend, mark, glaze, and adjust directly on the canvas, mirroring the organic rhythms of her creative process. The physicality of this approach lends itself to the tactile, layered surfaces in her work, where backgrounds emerge as blended fields of soft tones interrupted by assertive, often unexpected, accents of color. Oranges and blues frequently punctuate her paintings, creating moments of surprise amid the serenity.
Her visual vocabulary is filled with loose geometries, layered color fields, and gestural lines that evoke terrain and memory without prescribing a narrative. Though grounded in abstraction, her paintings often suggest natural elements—rocks, hills, water—hovering at the edge of recognition. This delicate tension between representation and abstraction is where Paster thrives. She seeks to offer a visual “hook” without anchoring the viewer too firmly in definition. It’s an approach that leaves room for interpretation and creates a rich space for reflection.
Sharon Paster: Between Landscape and Line
Paster’s practice is driven by her search for what she describes as a “sweet spot”—a place where abstraction and representation intermingle without overt clarity. Her subjects, whether a mountain range or coastal rocks, are treated with the same painterly touch that prioritizes spatial relationships and the emotive quality of composition. Over the years, her subject matter has shifted fluidly: beginning with man-made objects, transitioning into bushes and rocks from the Marin County landscape, and eventually expanding into explorations of sky, water, and even the human form. Each shift marks not a departure but an expansion—an ongoing negotiation between theme and technique.
Her current focus on the figure presents a new challenge. Unlike landscape elements that can remain ambiguous, the figure carries personal resonance and a demand for clarity. Paster finds herself grappling with how to abstract the human body without stripping it of its emotional charge. Still, she remains committed to the pursuit, bouncing between subjects and trusting the common thread of movement, air, and connection to bind her work together. This open-ended curiosity keeps her practice vibrant and evolving, rather than fixed in any single visual direction.
Throughout it all, the consistent use of oil pigment sticks anchors her work. This material aligns perfectly with her process-driven mindset. Initially discovered as a more forgiving alternative to oil pastels, pigment sticks offered her the fluidity of oil paint with the immediacy of drawing. Their lipstick-like texture allows for spontaneity and control—essential qualities for an artist working at the edge of abstraction. With this tool, Paster’s canvases become fields of intuitive decision-making, each layer a response to the previous one, each mark a dialogue between stability and spontaneity.
Art Born from Atmosphere and Intuition
The Northern California landscape plays a crucial role in shaping the energy of Paster’s paintings. Living and working just north of San Francisco in Sausalito, she is immersed in a creative community surrounded by coastal beauty, open-minded thinkers, and a strong outdoor culture. It’s not just the visual aspects of the Bay Area that influence her—it’s the sense of movement, the rhythm of tides, the ever-shifting fog. Her early paintings of shoes quickly gave way to depictions of bushes in conversation with each other, which then evolved into meditations on rocks and bodies of water. All of these elements serve as metaphors for interpersonal dynamics and unseen forces.
Her work resists easy categorization. While grounded in formal training and an academic background in fine arts, Paster’s practice remains instinctive. After a long hiatus from painting, it was the uninhibited creativity of children—and the scent of turpentine wafting from an art school window—that reignited her passion. Her return was anything but casual; she immersed herself in classes, surrounded herself with like-minded artists, and eventually found her tribe within the College of Marin’s creative programs. The experience rekindled her belief that art doesn’t need to be monumental to be meaningful—it simply needs to be alive.
This sense of vitality is what Paster brings into her studio every day. Located in the ICB Building in Sausalito, her studio is a light-filled space that overlooks the water and acts as both a sanctuary and a hub for collaboration. It’s here that she balances solitude and community, productivity and pause. She works for hours at a stretch, then steps back to view her work through fresh eyes. Whether she’s blending pigments directly on canvas or engaging in dialogue with fellow artists, Paster uses her studio as a place to explore not just form and color, but presence and perception.
Sharon Paster: Where Memory Becomes Movement
At the heart of Paster’s paintings lies a powerful sense of ambiguity—a refusal to offer closure or certainty. Her compositions ask questions rather than give answers. Is that a rock or a reclining figure? Is this a shoreline or an emotional landscape? The ambiguity is deliberate, and it’s where the emotional potency of her work lives. Her canvases are neither chaotic nor overly controlled. Instead, they are balanced ecosystems where every color, shape, and line participates in a larger conversation. This quality allows viewers to engage at their own pace, finding personal resonance in her evocative forms.
Even when she introduces the figure, it is done with restraint. Faces are absent, bodies are suggested rather than depicted, and the emotional weight comes from posture and placement rather than expression. These figures exist not as characters but as energies, folded into their surroundings like thoughts drifting into consciousness. They echo the landscapes she paints—both are solid yet dissolving, present yet unreachable. This approach mirrors her philosophy: nothing is fixed, everything is fleeting. That mantra becomes a quiet engine driving the structure and softness within her work.
Paster’s paintings serve as visual meditations—anchored in memory, sensation, and an acute awareness of spatial tension. Her pieces aren’t merely observed; they’re felt. They resist being pinned down, just like the moments they seek to capture. Whether viewed in a gallery or discovered online, her work invites viewers into a moment of stillness, where perception slows and nuance reigns. Sharon Paster has created a body of work that doesn’t shout to be heard. Instead, it whispers, hums, and pulses with the quiet rhythms of time and place.
