Sharon Habib

Sharon Habib is originally from South Africa and lives in Vancouver. She is largely self-taught, and has been painting for over 20 years. Starting out working representationally, she quickly embarked on the long road to working abstractly, challenged to find her own originality and artistic voice.

Her inspiration is mainly the natural results of weathering and decay – cracks in concrete or pavement, tree barks, fungi and lichens, peeling paint, water stains and the like. Her work is at times textured to resemble weathered surfaces.

A key characteristic of her work is marking. Often her surfaces resemble the scratches and scars we find in our natural environment. She is also inspired by the line drawings found in engineering and architectural images, as well as the use of lettering in graffiti and on packaging. Not being mathematical in any way, shape or form, she finds calculations and codes visually beautiful and these have found their way into her work as marks, as have maps and scientific diagrams.

Sharon attempts to balance complexity with simplicity so that the more the viewer looks at her work, the more they discover that they perhaps hadn’t seen at first glance. While her abstract gestures are free form, her marks are finely controlled and perhaps a relic of her days of working representational.

She works in acrylic, graphite, pen, and occasionally mixed media. Her works hang in homes and offices in South Africa, United Kingdom, Australia, Greece, United States and Canada. She lives with her husband and dog, Toffee, in Vancouver. Her other creative efforts have been in music where she performed in a rock opera in South Africa and wrote the score for a corporate video. She has also dabbled in jewellery making and ceramics.