A Sharp Eye For Detail

239

Barbara Sharp's fabric designs combine tradition with fun.

Have Brush, Will Travel. It doesn’t actually say that on Barbara Sharp’s business card, but it could. In her business as a professional muralist, Barbara, whose studio is located in Sebastian, has traveled throughout the Sunshine State, up north to Connecticut, Illinois and Virginia, and out west to Arizona and Washington state.

She aims to please, delivering to each client his or her particular vision of paradise, whether desert isle or rolling horse country, a sun-washed Florentine palazzo or a rustic thatched hut. Her work has graced private homes, restaurants, hotels, office buildings and the cabins of yachts and corporate jets. She has painted on walls and ceilings, indoors and out, in oil and in acrylic, on canvas and directly onto walls.

In addition to murals she also paints trompe l’oeil festoons of flowers and sea shells, laurel and grape leaves; installs illusory stone balusters in front of imaginary terraces; puts vases filled with flowers in make-believe windows and erects statues in ersatz niches. Using only paint she can dress up a room in faux suede, stencil elegant “wallpaper” on bare walls and transform ordinary pine moldings into marble, carved mahogany or malachite. Barbara’s motto, “Making your world beautiful” appears on her card, along with an abbreviated list of her areas of specialization: fabric design, wall coverings, murals and easel paintings. 

Business is booming, Barbara says, and while her commissioned works put food on the table the art that she does for charity sustains her soul; among her gifts to the community are murals at Hibiscus Children’s Village and McKee Botanical Garden. She donated a large tropical painting that was raffled at the 2007 Hibiscus Festival’s “Evening in Paradise” fund-raiser, and in 2006 and 2007 painted three 5 foot 8 inch-tall fiberglass sea turtles for the Mental Health Association’s Turtle Trax fund-raiser. 

Read the entire article in the November 2007 issue

Facebook Comments