I don’t have a story to tell through painting.
I try and I fail.
I try to understand how to ‘make a painting’ but instead the painting makes me.
It taunts me.
I am obsessed with paint; it is a fetish, a stand in for what I used to desire in my work, but it is more demanding and unresolved than any desire I have ever experienced.
How do you talk about something that involves every aspect of your present state and know-how to someone who is not you, other than by stepping back and letting them experience their own reception and perception of the work?
I want the seduction of paint itself to be perceived.
Personal details: born and raised in Toronto, deep roots in Newfoundland and the Gaspé, spouse still living, child long grown, MFA, PhD, EiEiO
-P Elaine Sharpe
In the following interview, the book mentioned can be found here, and the details for the current show she is having is below.
Pareidolia – P Elaine Sharpe
October 5 – October 28
Opening Thursday, October 5th, 6-9pm
Pareidolia, an exhibition of paintings by Toronto based artist P Elaine Sharpe, marks her first solo exhibition with Wil Kucey Gallery.
Sharpe focuses her time in the studio on examining the intricate subtleties and boundaries of the painting process. The resulting collection of work reflects an intimate engagement with exploring surface and application. The results are generous to both producer and viewer.
Sharpe has developed a vocabulary of line and formal expression in paint that provides the framework for the multiple bodies of work included in the exhibition.
Whether focused on the unfurling of sinewy strands or reveling in the geology of paint revealed through sanding, obscuring, and reconstruction, Sharpe finds a tactile and sense-based pleasure in making her work, honing her interests in pushing the inherent constraints of space, material and the search for fulfillment throughout her processes.
Michelle Shiu-lin Lai is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary performance artist whose work transitions between movement, text, and image. Lai investigates the primal poetics of space through a process-based extraction of text through body memory/history, & butoh influenced sensitivity training. Lai recently performed her work in the debut of band Linear Ghost at the Bluewhale, Downtown LA- a collaboration with artist musicians Robert Jacobson, Breeze Smith, Darryl Tewes, & Tim Maher. Lai performed solo work “This Mouth and the Space of Nothing” at A+D Museum downtown LA (2016) and frequently collaborates with a range of artists across different media including film/ video, visual, sculpture, & sound. Lai has created works in performance art trio PO1 with Heyward Bracey and Kio Griffith, presenting a series of multi-media explorations of body, self, time, & identity. She has performed in works at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, the UCLA Fowler Museum, the John Paul Getty Museum, Hammer Museum, Grand Park, among other institutions and sites in California, the Eastern United States, & in temple ceremony abroad at Junjungan Village, Ubud, Bali. Lai practices architecture and continues to train and perform with Oguri & Roxanne Steinberg’s Venice-based Body Weather Laboratory (2009-present). 
