Sharna Fabiano
I never expected to become a painter.
But as I finished graduate school and was faced with limited resources and lingering injuries, I saw the proverbial writing on the wall. The chapter of dance in my life was ending. At the suggestion of a friend, I started an art journal as a personal practice. That journal opened the door for my identity as a visual artist to emerge.
A longtime practitioner of yoga, the concepts of mindfulness, intention, and creativity had already influenced my choreography and my teaching of social dance. Now I became more and more interested in how the cultivation of one’s inner state influences artistic craft, and vice versa. Painting gave me a way to explore this idea in another medium.
Focusing on color and texture, and allowing the mind to rest on the sensation of marking the canvas, my abstract compositions are inspired both by the witnessing state of sitting meditation and by the active listening and responding of the body in improvised dance and theater. Currently, I’m exploring texture on both large and tiny size canvases and with the versatility of acrylic paints, finding ever-increasing depth in the trust and patience required to allow the many layers of each painting to unfold organically.
