Finding a Path to Serious Fun: Meet Sari Shryack
A quick glance at Ep. 40 guest Shari Shryack’s art and you’re going to notice a few things fast.
Shryack’s work covers a lot of territory subject wise. Scan the artist’s instagram and you’ll see everything from disco balls to Barbies in Walmart to the West Texas landscape.
What brings together this versatile work is the artist’s use of bright colors and her wonderful sense of play.
But what might be less apparent is that those bright colors and playfulness didn’t necessarily come quickly or naturally. In fact, they began with an artist who was busy proving herself as an athlete and student… then almost gave up art completely.
EARLY ATHLETE
Shryack loved art casually as a kid but growing up poor, she says she didn’t have access to much by way of supplies or study.
Instead her interests turned to sports and she became a college athlete and approached her running very seriously.
When it came time to choose a college major, she wanted something easy so that she could focus on her running.
“I think naively I thought that art would be an easier major,” says Shryack.
Art brought her into the orbit of an art teacher that would change the trajectory of her life.
“I took my Foundation of Art class with an amazing professor. His name's Todd Lowry. And he also happened to be the painting instructor here, and I fell in love with this philosophy.”
AFTER ART SCHOOL
Shryack left art school and got married, moved and had a child in quick succession. By the time she looked at her art supplies again, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to do art.
She knew the answer wouldn’t come to her by thinking alone, so she set out to start a daily art practice with what she had. And what she had was watercolor crayons and nap time.
“I didn't have a lot of time,” she says, “But because time was such a constraint, I started with just ink doodles, and then watercolor, just the Crayola palette of watercolors. Super, super meager.”
What started as a small daily practice snowballed into more space and eventually her own studio and a full time thriving practice today.
INSPIRATION THROUGH LIFE
Shryack finds inspiration everywhere.
From the iphone screen time report to the Barbie aisle in Walmart, Shryack is looking out at the world through painter’s eyes.
What she’s looking for primarily is good light. Light permits her to play with value and color and warms and cools.
“Maybe it's not Starry Night by Van Gogh, but it's still beautiful and it's so worth making art over.” - Sari Shryack
Good light can be anywhere from the still life she sets up herself or something she happens across like her laundry series.
“ I wish I just kept up in my laundry, but I don't,” says Shryack of her neverending laundry series. “[The laundry pile is] in a window with beautiful light. And my kids will sometimes turn it into forts. I know it's chaos, but I love it so much.”
For Shryack, this is the perfect subject for painting.
“I have a wall where it's just every couple of days, I'll put one on there. And it's that thread of, it's your life. And maybe it's not Starry Night by Van Gogh, but it's still beautiful and it's so worth making art over.”
PERMISSION TO PLAY
There was a seriousness to art school and about the art world at large. She always felt like her work had to be serious to be taken seriously.
“The backdrop of the art world…If you're not saying something that's changing the world, you're not saying anything,” says Shryack. “I think that's an important thing to have. But if it's the dominant thought when you sit down and make your art, especially as a young artist, or a green artist, that's going to crush you.”
Also, Shryack realized that she wasn’t that serious.
In order to work as hard as she was working, she needed to enjoy what she was creating. She found ways to create a sense of play in her paintings including the subjects she paints and the colors she uses to paint them.
“In real life, I'm very silly. I love playing with my kids. I love puns. I'm just a big, Goofy, colorful person. And so that's the kind of art I make now.”
GOING BRIGHT
Shryack’s palette includes colors like phthalo blue and dioxazine purple. On their own, they are some of the most highly saturated pigments available.
But her colorful paintings don’t happen simply through throwing a bunch of random straight-from -the-tube pigments.
Instead, she goes in with a plan of attack and builds up her paintings.
“I'm sort of sneaking up on it.”
After her drawing is down, her paintings take several passes to work up to the bright colors she uses. She knows what she wants to sparkle and then makes sure that the objects surrounding that help.
Like she learned in college, Shryack works dark to light and unsaturated to saturated. She will use mostly one brush for each pass as a way to first dull her colors down a bit and harmonize by having a bit of each color in every other color.
She also will occasionally bracket her values. This is something she learned from Zoey Frank, where instead of using all the values on a 9 point value scale, she will pull everything more into the middle values so that there is less value contrast in her paintings filled with color contrasts.
“If I do too high a [value] contrast in a painting that uses non local colors, I will get myself in cartoon town really fast.”
FOLLOWING HER OWN VOICE
Shryack fulling admits that her art isn’t for everyone.
“Sometimes what I'm doing with color makes people's skin crawl. And then for other people, it's not enough color even.”
And as an artist who puts work online, people let her know what they think.
But outside of a few mentors and her husband, Shryack takes no one else’s advice but her own. She doesn’t really care what people think about her work. It’s not for everyone. It’s for herself and those who connect to it.
“My best analogy for art is like you're playing catch and it's not going to land with everyone. Not everyone's gonna catch it.” says Shryack. “But when you put something out in the world and that target audience who resonates with it receives that message. It's like, the best feeling in the world.”
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