Written By: Bevil Conway

 Sharon Christian (1950-2015; also Sharon Holmes) was a Canadian artist best known for her paintings and sculptures, many of which document intimate encounters with nature. She was raised on a family farm near Innisfail, Alberta. She spent much of her professional career in and around Vancouver British Columbia. She was the 3rd of 3 children born to Roy Christian and Mary Christian nee Zwarych. She died on July 6, 2015, five weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. She was survived by her long-time partner Brian Becker, their son Dwayne and his family.

Over her long professional career, Christian explored a number of themes including climate change, the tension between urban and natural environments, the place of painting in contemporary culture, and the relationships between contemporary art (including music), historical traditions, and individual experience. She was an early pioneer of a counter-culture that sought to reengage art with sincerity and beauty, against the 1980s’ preoccupation with irony and sarcasm. She was especially inspired by Matisse and Picasso. Because of her choice of subjects and her whimsical yet earnest approach, Christian has been compared to Canadian folk artists such as Maud Lewis. Her portrait of Maud Lewis addressed this association directly. But Christian is distinguished from folk artists by her masterful draftsmanship and professional art training. Her early work consisted of carefully rendered watercolors that often took as subjects the old farm equipment in and around her family farm and the people in the bustling expanding Chinatown. Through this work, Christian documented the changing landscape and demographics of Western Canada.

Her later work is often playful and humorous, and showcases rich layers of visual allusions. “Bird for Matisse”. is a collage in which the body (or interior) of the bird is made from a watercolor reproduction made by Christian of Matisse’s famous studio interior (“The Pink Studio” from 1911). The counter-change that establishes the volume of the bird is achieved by cutting a negative space around the tail of the bird while modeling the feet and breast of the bird with positive shapes. Parallels could be drawn to the work of David Hockney, whose work during this time period was similarly preoccupied with visual puzzles that manifest the dialectic between physical objects and pictoriality. But unlike many of her contemporaries, Christian was obsessed with the craft of art making and used almost exclusively archival materials (Hockney, for example, went through phases using ephemeral materials such as fax paper).

Christian worked predominantly through careful observation, using copious sketches and photographs as reference material. Her use of color is especially celebrated, extending the modern tradition cemented by Henri Matisse. Matisse was a towering influence on her: as a subject matter (notably Matisse’s relationship to his pets), as material for her own collage work, and as a master colorist. Christian felt a deep spiritual connection to the natural world and especially to non-human sentient beings. Animals, and the connection she felt with them, were often the focus of her work. Draft horses were a subject throughout her career, as were birds of many kinds (especially crows), squirrels, bears, coyotes, cats, dogs, and mice. She was a kind of mystic, not unlike Francis of Assisi or William Blake. Christian’s work often documents a private experience of intimate scale. Her “Canada Geese in Stanley Park”, a collage from the mid 1990’s, is composed from fragments of thickly applied oil paintings and uniform flat gouache that together have as their focal point a fiddlehead fern. Christian’s work gains broad appeal through its specificity—indeed much of Christian’s work can be interpreted as refracted self-portraiture. She said "for me, art is a communication about the world as I see it ... my paintings represent me, who I am, and how I think”. Her work was fundamentally personal, highly original, and honest, not unlike Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits.

Christian’s work rarely depicts sweeping vistas, nor does it comprise grandiose installations. Instead Christian favored subjects and a scale that she could grasp—baby crows, fallen from their nest; stray cats; squirrels and the nuts they hoard; flowers and weeds. In some ways, through this subject matter and her laser-like observation, her work appealed to earlier traditions advanced by Northern Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer (see especially Dürer’s watercolors of rabbits and patches of turf). Within the context of the bombastic and neo-grand movements in the 1980’s, which themselves followed on the heels of the hyper-masculine abstract expressionists, Christian’s work is distinctively personal and feminist. Her work is often a tool that she uses to scrutinize the human relationship to nature (and specifically her own relationship to nature), and to underscore her conviction that humans should be custodians of nature. This theme is the central focus of her “Mother Nature” series, in which she depicts Mother Nature as a self-sufficient itinerant traveler, pots and pans standing in metaphorically for the instruments to nourish and protect nature (Christian was also a gifted cook). One of her last complete bodies of work, “Monsters in the Garden”, is a Guernica-like critique of the failure of humans to adequately take care of the environment in the face of industrialization and climate change. In an age of digital-media explosion, when the role of painting in society was subjected to renewed questions, Christian’s work showed painting to be still clearly relevant.

Christian showed artistic promise from an early age, receiving her first art commission at age 10. She is an alumna of the University of Calgary, and taught art at H.D. Cartwright Secondary School in Calgary (1971-1977) and within the public school system of West Vancouver. At various stages in her life, she lived in Boulder Colorado, Whistler British Columbia, West Vancouver B.C., and Chilliwack B.C. At age 29 (under her married name Sharon Holmes), Christian was the youngest member admitted to the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour. She was also a member of the Alberta Society of Artists . Early in her career, Christian was represented by the Masters Gallery and the Wallace Galleries, both in Calgary. , And in 1988 and 1997, Christian’s work was featured on the Avon corporate Christmas Card. In 1998 Christian and Becker opened and ran the Seewall Gallery in West Vancouver, showcasing emerging artists from Western Canada. Christian wrote and self-published two books, including “The Thin Wolf Without the Collar” re-named “A Life's Journey of Art”, which is Christian’s response to Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” (1908). Christian received several art awards, but during her lifetime she eschewed the mainstream of commercial art. Her work is in several public collections, including the Alberta Art Foundation, Crown Life, Husky Oil, the Calgary Herald, the Calgary Philharmonic, and Royal LePage Realty, along with hundreds of private collections throughout North America. During her lifetime she sold over 2000 paintings, mostly through private sales. Christian’s work regularly comes up for auction in the secondary market of outstanding Canadian artists.