Sharon Core - Pop Art or Early American Master Still Life Photographer

Still Life with Branzino and Wild Striper © Sharon Core

After seeing this image in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I wanted to write about the work of Sharon Core. Sharon smashed an ace in 2003 with her photographs based upon Wayne Thiebaud's paintings and sold, if not every print in the edition, so many prints at Bellwether Gallery that Bellwether left Williamsburg for Chelsea. If you don't know the Thiebaud paintings or Sharon's photographs, she was able to create exact replicas of what Thiebaud painted from imagination. Call her work overly conceptual, I call it amazing (and maybe a bit obsessive compulsive.) Imagine the lighting control and forced perspective when looking at the work- not to mention the culinary control!

I emailed Sharon because I was curious about her crossover from the fine art world to the world of magazines. I wondered if The Times picture had been an assignment or, as the photograph had a decidedly Dutch-master feel to it, was it maybe part of a new series she was working that the Times just happened to pick up. She wrote that it was the best of both worlds. The Times had seen a preview of the work at her new gallery Yancey Richardson and commissioned her to use this feel for the food story about striped bass.

It turns out that Sharon's new work is based upon the painter Raphaelle Peale (son of early American painter Charles Wilson Peale and brother of Rembrandt and Titian.) Charles is said to have started what is considered the first museum in America and named his children after famous painters.

Sharon is still developing the work and plans to show in early 2009. Get a preview here.

Here's a good article from the Times. Here's the Thiebauds at Bellwether.

And here's a Thiebaud painting and a Sharon Core photograph:

Cakes 2003, ©Sharon Core