Sherrie Wolf
"My still life paintings evolve out of my passion for arranging objects. I delight in the objects themselves, as well as the spaces between and within them. I marvel at their beauty; I enjoy making visual and conceptual associations between objects in a form of viewable alliteration. My compositions are theatrical, as if the setting is a stage on which a drama is being performed."
- Sherrie Wolf
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Sherrie Wolf, "Tulips at Sunset (F. Church)" 2020, oil on linen, 40 x 40 inches
Sherrie Wolf, "Peach and Plum on Green ," 2022, oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches, $2,400
Sherrie Wolf, "Plum Pyramid," 2022, oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches, $2,400
Sherrie Wolf, "Pear on Blue," 2022, oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches, $2,400
Sherrie Wolf, "Red and Yellow Pear on Green," 2022, oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches, $2,400
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Sherrie Wolf, "Tulips with Portrait from Louvre," 2017, oil on linen, 24 x 36 inches, $6,700
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Sherrie Wolf, "Tulips with Courbet (Stills)," 2013, oil on linen, 24 x 16 inches - SOLD
"My recent Teacup paintings circle back to a subject matter I have used in the past and possesses deep personal histories for me. I like the way teacups represent hospitality, tradition, utilitarian design, and serve as a comforting respite. As the daughter of an immigrant from New Zealand, tea was a daily ritual in our home. My mother, aunt, and grandmother always consumed tea from a fine porcelain teacup. The Stewart cup, which is my mother’s maiden name, may have been carried over on the ocean liner with her when she immigrated. I have combined the teacups with backgrounds from some of my favorite landscape paintings, such as those by Dutch and American painters Ruisdael and Bierstadt. The contrast of scale, with a romantic idealized setting enhances the power of these teacups." - Sherrie Wolf
Sherrie Wolf, "Gardenia Teacup," 2019, oil on linen, 16 x 16 inches - SOLD
Sherrie Wolf, "Blue and Gold Teacup," 2019, oil on linen, 16 x 16 inches, $3,400
Sherrie Wolf, "Pair of Teacups," 2019, oil on linen, 16 x 24 inches, $4,200
Sherrie Wolf, "Teacup 5," 2019, oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches, $2,400
sold works & installation shots
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ARTIST STATEMENT
"I have always been a still-life painter. My images openly play with the fact that art is artifice. For the last decade, I have arranged objects in front of excerpts from old master paintings. Earlier in my career, while imitating 19th century American Trompe l’oil and 17th century Dutch still-life traditions in subject matter and formal elements of composition, I explored contrived or discovered relationships between seemingly unrelated objects. Mirrors or other formal objects often reflected the contemporary clutter of my studio. Light, shadow and three-dimensional spatial relationships played important roles.
I often use nontraditional perspectives, such as looking straight down on the still life arrangement. Among the subject matter, there will be an open book or a card portraying an image from a historical painting. In time, these excerpts became more prominent, and eventually I filled the entire background with a quotation from an old master painting. This connected me to a history of reinterpretation and artistic borrowing prevalent among artists. My images have evolved from a love of art history and a desire to present multiple levels of expression to my viewer." - Sherrie Wolf
Sherrie Wolf reviewed in the press:
“Sherrie Wolf juxtaposes exquisitely rendered still-life compositions with Old Master themes. She offers a fresh approach to the still-life genre that is unique in contemporary art, and that places her work at the forefront of a long and distinguished tradition that dates back to the late Gothic period and even earlier.” - John Olbrantz, Director of Hallie Ford Museum of Art
“Like Cézanne and Wayne Thiebaud, Sherrie Wolf's sensory paintings seduce the ordinary by upending our assumptions about reality. A first reaction to Sherrie Wolf’s images is to marvel at how “real” they are, until you grasp what a trickster she is. Goblets glow as if lit from within; silverware invents its own reflections; cherries are glazed like porcelain—and the laws of perspective are upended. She is deceiving us, leading us to perceive something more exciting then real.” - David Slader, Oregon Artswatch, January 13, 2022
“It doesn’t take much more than a glance to see the careful intention behind the arrangement of objects in Sherrie Wolf’s still life paintings. Many of the scenes are busy, packed from one edge to the other with an eclectic assembly of objects—but even in her fullest compositions, a thoughtful order of composition is clearly visible in every inch of the scene. The objects portrayed might be motionless, but the scenes are anything but still.”
“Sherrie Wolf’s paintings skirt the line of photorealism, portraying their subject matter as extremely life-like, but still stylized enough to call attention to their status as paint strokes on a canvas. Besides references to art history, Sherrie Wolf has a fondness for tulips, a favorite subject matter of the 17th-century Dutch artists whose work she draws from.”
– Tanner Todd, PSU Vanguard, January 19, 2022