DOROTHEA SHARP | Children Playing with Balloons
Dorothea Sharp's Children Playing with Balloons is a joyful celebration of childhood, movement and light, painted with the freshness and spontaneity for which she is so admired. Set against a sunlit coastal landscape, two children are captured mid-play as brightly coloured balloons lift into the sky, their buoyancy mirrored in the animated brushwork and lively palette. The composition is carefully balanced, with the soft chalky cliffs and open sky providing a calm backdrop to the animated gestures of the children. Loose, expressive strokes describe billowing clothing and wind-touched grasses. Sharp's ability to suggest form without rigidity gives the painting its distinctive sense of freedom, echoing the innocence and imagination of childhood itself.
Dorothea Sharp believed colour to be as important as form in the creation of a work and painted quickly with a heavily loaded brush. These ideas and techniques were learnt in Paris where she became influenced by the Impressionists, particularly by Monet.
Harold Sawkins, editor of The Artist Journal, claimed in 1935 that Dorothea sharp was ‘one of England’s greatest living woman painters’. He declared that: “No other woman artist gives us such joyful paintings as she. Full of sunshine and luscious colour, her work is always lively, harmonious and tremendously exhilarating ... her subjects appeal because they are based on the joy of life ... the chief attractions of Miss Sharp’s delightful pictures are her happy choice of subjects, and her beautiful colour schemes’’
- Free shipping for artworks above £5,000 in the UK. For International customers please contact us for a shipping quote.
