Life After All : Sharon Elphick: Into the Neo-Pop 1980s and Beyond

Sharon Elphick, Bauhaus Bouquet. She added flowers and trees to her well-known urban landscapes and graffiti art, and that's when I discovered her. She is a commercially successful artist. Google Sharon Elphick artist/images for dozens of her art works and products for sale.

Spot the Difference. Gilcee print. @ art.com for
wonderful wall art, prints, posters, paintings.

Popular ceramic items for sale.

Sharon Elphick was born in the same era as my daughters, the mid-
1960s, and they came of age in the same decade, the 1980s.

I wasn't really into the music and cultural trends of that time and found hip hop and electronic pop music beyond my understanding. Yep, my kids thought I was out of it. I knew they felt the same way about my music as I did about theirs. But hey, let's move on from Elvis Pressley and the Everly Brothers, because I have recently discovered some fabulous women artists who were greatly influenced by the 1980s and whose art I now find fascinating.

Sharon Elphick is among them. Art historians note that during the 80s "influential art movements included Neo Geo, the Pictures Generation, and Neo-Expressionism." I admit these movements slid by me. I perked up a bit with the street art and graffiti movements, but it took a while to educate myself to these art forms. I'm still learning. It's enlightening, and fun.

There's not much biographical information about Sharon Elphick. She was born in the north of England and began her career as a textile artist. A few years after receiving an art degree in printed textiles, she moved from the more rural regions of the UK to London.

Elphick, Architectural landscapes in signature grids

Graffiti.

She ran smack into the 1980s and absorbed it all. She was fascinated by the urban landscape, especially the high-rise architecture, and also the grafitti art of the time. They inspired a burst of creativity that made Elphick a popular and highly respected artist from the mid-1980s and 1990s to the present.

Her love of pattern and texture, her use of geographic forms, grids and close spaces, spoke to the modernism of her generation. Neo Geo. This is the art for which Elphick became widely known and also commercially successful. As an article in the UK's Metro Times in 2008 noted: "Sharon Elphick is best known for her inventive patterns built up from fragments of the urban landscape. High-rise flats are transformed into wallpaper, and aerosol spots and architectural angles rearranged into brightly coloured abstract grids reminiscent of the paintings of the futurists and vorticists* of the early 20th century."

I like her modern art, but it wasn't what drew me into learning more about her. I saw photos of her flowers, trees and print and textile mosaics of the changing seasons on Christa Zaat's online Female Artists in History. To some of her fans at the time it might have seemed like a drastic move away from her popular style to a more traditional and floral style.

Now that I've seen more images of her work I can see that it's all distinctively Sharon Elphick. Her inspiration and content may have shifted a bit, but she didn't abandon the signature style that made her art loved and sold, in all its variety. She saw patterns, architectural shapes, and geographic forms in nature too, styling them into contemporary structures and grids that balance the more traditional. In the process, she created some wonderful and eye-catching pop art urban gardens for us. How delightful is that?

Now that I know about Elphick's art, I am seeing it everywhere. On mugs and plates, on posters, on Art.net, Pinterest, Epsy and other online art-for-sale sites.

No wonder Elton John bought a copy of every editioned print after her work was featured in London's Times newspaper in 2008. I think I may even have caught a glimpse of some pieces when Linda Furney and I were at the Frieda Kahlo exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum a few years ago. I aim to go back and take another look.

Meanwhile, I am suggesting Sharon Elphick's art to my niece Ali, a nurse who's started her own interior design consulting business because she loves it. Her clients are eclectic, she says, so who knows but one of them might find Elphick as enchanting as Elton John did. Wallpaper, maybe, or a Gilcee print, a poster or a landscape painting. It's a whole new wonderful world.

New collages by Sharon Elphick weblog

Sources:

Elphick's gallery and shop,
160 Columbia Rd, London,
for next time I'm there.

* https://metro.co.uk/2008/08/13/sharon-elphicks-fleur-shows-consistency-in-change-378544/

* https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/elphicks-london?select=EgVInhZeesjqYRTONbofpg

* Prints and Fine Arts website: https://www.printsandfineart.co.uk/artist/3374/sharon-elphick#

* Had to look this up. The vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 with the aim of creating art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world, kind of like the machines in the garden. Ezra Pound's wife was among them. See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/may/28/vorticists-tate-britain-exhibition-review.. Here are a few examples.