JOAN SHARROCK ........... Artist - Wildlife Painter
JOAN SHARROCK ........... Artist - Wildlife Painter
Number 7 Winter 1998/1999
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to see all 12 tigers
Tigers running, tigers sleeping, tigers bathing and tigers just lazing around. Every month of the1999 Exxon Calendar 1999 Exxon Calendar has a tiger picture taken from a Joan Sharrock painting. Joan had painted enough tigers over the years for Exxon and Teldon Calendars to choose from and a calendar of tiger paintings is proving very popular among Exxon dealers who are ordering them in greater numbers this year as promotional gifts for their best customers. These calendars are not available in retail stores. The artist has a few extra on hand, while they last.
THE NEWS
Christie's South Kensington in London held two wildlife art auctions in 1998. In May they sold Joan Sharrock's paintings "Lily Dabblers", a painting of mallard ducks, "Leap of Faith", a tiger leaping off a rock, and "Splash" a Bengal tiger running through the surf. "Splash" went for £4,945sterling (that's just under $12,000 Canadian at current rates of exchange). At the October auction "Path of Generations", a painting of elephants, was also sold.
Joan Sharrock was featured in US ART MAGAZINE's April 1998 issue in an article entitled:"WILD WOMEN OF WILDLIFE ART" The first paragraph began:
"Joan Sharrock reads a lot about the adventurous antics of the men with whom she shares her profession. Their tales of thrilling safaris and resource-gathering trips generally elicit the same response from the British-born artist: "Been there, done that."
ON SAFARI - INFLORIDA!
"It did feel a bit like being on safari and I said as much to my fellow wildlife enthusiasts - five photographers, both professional and amateur, all anxious to see whatever was still available in southwest Florida.We stayed in Fort Myers and each day started out before dawn in a mini bus loaded with all our photographic gear and food and a cooler of drinks for lunch. It was a typical Joseph Van Os Photosafari - long days, good company and guaranteed best spots for photographing wildlife.
There is a heron rookery in Venice, Florida, if you know where to find it. Great blue herons along with egrets, anhingas and coots nest on a small island in a lake which is now encroached upon by new condo development. The birds were persistent in their efforts at nesting and the earlybird photographers were equally persistent in their efforts at getting just the right picture!
After a picnic lunch we headed south to the Corkscrew Swamp, near Naples, Florida. This sanctuary is made accessible with extensive boardwalks. Here we split up and each of us sought our own experience of the many varied ecosystems of the swamp with its cypress trees, mosses, ibises, herons and alligators!
The next day was devoted to Sanibel Island, home of the Ding Darling wildlife refuge with its tidal mud flats and mangrove swamps! Here we could get quite close to night herons, ibises and the easily spotted, but elusive, pink roseate spoonbills. These were the very birds that I had come to photograph.
(At left: A swarm of photographers spot some roseate spoonbills.)
My motives for joining an organized trip were to get reference material for my paintings. I lacked photographs of many of those very beautiful wading birds for which Florida is famous. While my companions were busy taking their carefully exposed slides using tripods and packing tons of heavy photographic equipment, I traveled light, with film stuffed into my safari vest and an auto-focus camera with motordrive and zoom lens hanging round my neck. My negative film gets printed onto contact sheets which are easy to see at a glance. Then I file the contact sheets in a box and the negative sheets in a binder (with matching numbers, of course) and later (sometimes decades later) I can get the 8x10 enlargements I want in order to see the details to paint from.
These dawn to dusk expeditions are hard work for a late-riser like me. The usual Van Os clients won't quit until the light has faded and there is no more hope of exposing another Kodachrome 64! In the absence of well-lit birds - they photograph the sunset! Getting the photos is fun if somewhat exhausting; composing the paintings and actually doing them is more relaxing but it takes a lot longer - maybe even years. My motto: "Photograph in haste - Paint at Leisure."
- Joan
P.S. - Does anyone want me to paint them an alligator?
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