Shakti Sarkin

Painting, Sculpture, Metal, Wood

My focus for this Art04 Studio Tour is all things trees. Here is a little bit more about me and my process:

1. Creativity in art — moving beautifully colored oils on a canvas, shaping and welding wire, finding and using new sculptural mediums —is how I release my deep love of visual expression.

2. I create representational paintings, and for the past eight years I have also been drawn to paint abstractly.

3. I listen to music while I paint — my mind disengages from the words and meanings and I just feel. I like where that leads my brush.

4. In my sculptures, I preserve tree bark by cleaning, dehydrating and polyurethaning it prior to attaching it to my welded steel armatures.

5. The fire that destroyed the loblolly pine forests and the Bastrop area in Texas was the muse that triggered my use of trees and bark in sculpture.

6. My artwork often represents the resemblances between seemingly disparate things and how their movement and connectedness point to an order and relationship in the universe: trees to roots to soil to mycelia; branches to air to sky to solar systems; a brain’s branching neural pathways constantly moving throughout a body causing speech, movement, silent communication, appreciation of beauty.

7. During my years of working full time as a single mother, I tenaciously kept creating artwork: hiring models to paint while living in LA; winning an art contest where my oil painting was chosen to be on the cover of an international art materials catalog; forming and participating in a weekly life drawing group when I lived in England; creating ten paintings for a design group in London; painting my Austin friends weekly in soft pastels, etc.

8. Many years later after I had moved in with my new husband, he asked what was in the portfolios under the bed. I pulled them out and showed him what I had been painting. His question was, “What are these doing under the bed? They’re beautiful. They should be up on the walls.” At that moment, my career as a professional artist began.

ShaktiSarkin.com

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Art Tour Stop 4: Residential Studio

2111 Montclaire Street