Bill Sharp is a painter and printmaker who lives and works in Oregon.

 

His painting practice was interrupted for many years, when his wife, Leslie, became ill. After her death, Bill devoted himself to his painting practice full time again.

 

The experience of caring for his wife and seeing her through the end of her life had a profound effect on Bill’s experience of the world. The sense that life had once made dissolved. Painting became an exploration into seeing what it is about being alive that is so difficult to let go of. He looks at things now without the necessity of making sense of them, and tries to paint through the subject to what it is that drew him to it, what made him want to attach to it and thereby to life. 

 

Bill Sharp studied painting and printmaking at the University of Delaware and the Maryland Institute College of Art.