Sharon Reeber

Sharon Reeber is breaking new ground by exploring contemporary visual ideas with the ancient art form of painting on silk.

Landscape imagery often forms the starting point for Reeber's poetic paintings characterized by vivid use of color and a magical atmosphere. Reeber uses Dupont dyes on habotai silk, and often thickens the dyes with sodium alginate for brushy textures. She prefers water-soluble Silkpaint resist colored with dyes. She sometimes uses multiple steamings for a single painting in order to glaze layers of color. This medium perfectly suits her love of color and expressive gesture, and the resulting images dance and shimmer in the light.

Best known for her large-scale paintings on silk, she also works in watercolor and lithography. Her work has been exhibited and collected across the U.S. and overseas, and is featured in the book The Best of Silkpainting (North Light Press, 1997).

Reeber grew up in Westchester County, New York, and first studied art in New York City. She went on to study painting, art history, and languages at Tufts University and at the Eberhard-Karls University in Tuebingen, Germany. Upon receiving her degree she extended her residency in Europe for several years, working, studying and exhibiting her art. During her travels in the Far East she was invited to Tokyo and was granted access to one of the major private collections of historical Japanese screen paintings to study the design of traditional Japanese painting on silk.

After many years of study and experimentation, as well as a journey that has taken her from the medieval cathedrals of Europe to the Japanese Shinto temples, and then back to the United States, Sharon Reeber creates paintings in which the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.