Sydney based painter Charlie Sheard has been exploring the poetic nature of painting since the early 1980s. Having exhibited widely in Australia, Europe and America over the last three decades, his most recent works explore the pure language of abstraction and the artist’s pursuit of meaning and clarity through the act of painting.

Currently teaching at Sydney’s College of Fine Art, Sheard is also known for his informative workshops and lectures on the history and philosophy of painting from the Renaissance to 20th century. He has completed a range of public commissions for major organisations including the University of Sydney and KPMG and has works represented in major national and international collections including Mona, The World Bank, New York, Clare Hall College, Cambridge, Macquarie Bank, Sydney, Western Mining, Melbourne and Deakin University, Melbourne as well as numerous private collections in the UK, USA, Belgium and Australia.

My paintings are pure abstraction. This means that meaning in my work is carried directly by colours, materiality, handling of paint and arrangement of forms, not by narrative or an associative relationship to any model or idea. As Kandinsky wrote in 1936, “the abstract painter derives his ‘stimulus’ not from some part or other of nature, but from nature as a whole”. Nor is abstract painting merely image-making; it consists of direct transmission of bodily energy, including transmission of emotions and memories held in the artist’s body.

My experience as an abstract painter is that each colour takes a particular form (or shape) requisite at any given moment to the emotions held in and expressed through the body at that moment. Colour and form are therefore married to emotion in the moment. In order to be meaningful, this marriage must be informed by extensive art history and an adequate mastery of techniques and materials.

I am deeply interested in the history and development of painting techniques and materials.  My paintings are based around the intrinsic qualities of pigments, vehicles and supports, of which I use an unusually large number. Intrinsic textural diversity is carefully cultivated and developed in each painting. I am very interested in laying traditional methods and materials alongside those of more recent origin, within the same painting, and I want to use the broadest range of forms possible.                                                                                                      -  Charlie Sheard, November 2011