About
Sharon Moody is a contemporary realist painter whose work focuses on still life and illusionism; her current series depicts vintage comic books in a trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) style. She arranges her subjects to focus on the excitement and anticipation of reading, and captures a moment in time as pages turn. The subject matter celebrates mass-produced consumer products and references the Pop art roots of these works, and her meticulous rendering nods to Photorealism.
Trompe l’oeil paintings aim to momentarily deceive the viewer into believing that they are seeing a real three-dimensional object instead of a two-dimensional painting. For that reason, trompe l'oeil painters often depict subject matter that is playful or amusing, and it is in this vein that Moody explores objects associated with entertainment. “Popular culture, including entertainment, leisure activities, games, and other reflections of our pleasure-seeking society, is arguably our country’s largest export today,” she says.
Moody’s work was included in recent museum surveys of contemporary realism, such as Fort Wayne Museum of Art’s Contemporary Realism Biennial and the traveling exhibition Photorealism Revisited, which was seen at the Butler Art Institute and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Her work was exhibited in the first gallery survey of photorealism in Canada, Galerie de Bellefueill’s Beyond Realism, and included in Louis Meisel’s book Photorealism in the Digital Age (2013). In New York she has exhibited at Meisel Gallery, Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, and Bernarducci Gallery. On the west coast, her work is represented by Scott Richards Contemporary Art in San Francisco. Her works are held in private and public collections including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Schwartz Collection of Contemporary Art at Harvard Business School, The George Washington University, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank among others.
Background
Moody was born in 1951 in Miami, Florida and grew up in North Carolina, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Appalachian State University in printmaking and drawing. After college she moved to Washington, D.C. where she worked as a graphic artist while producing a series of realist drawings that were exhibited at the Washington Women’s Art Center. After relocating to New Jersey, she continued working as a publication designer and also began her first series of photorealist paintings of exurban landscapes, winning a Fellowship in Painting from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. After returning with her family to the Washington, D.C. area, she earned an MFA in painting at George Washington University where she was appointed the Morris Louis Fellow. She copied masterworks at the National Gallery of Art as part of her technical training. Moody has combined her studio practice with teaching for decades at several schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., including George Washington University and Georgetown University. Through the 1990’s and 2000’s her work focused on still life painting as she created several series of works. Since that time her work has focused exclusively on trompe l’oeil compositions which have been exhibited nationally and internationally.