LewAllen Galleries opens an exhibition of new paintings by Sharon Booma, entitled The space between that goes on view beginning Friday, September 27, 2024 and runs through October 21.

A longtime artist at LewAllen, Booma is regarded for her enigmatic mixed-media paintings wielding an extraordinary array of textures and rhythms of color. Her meditative abstractions feature a multitude of dynamic relationships between the impulses of intention and intuition, which the artist guides into a state of charged equilibrium. Above all, the effect is that of carefully realized harmonies.

A Florida-based artist, who was raised in Massachusetts, Booma has been an exhibiting painter since the mid-1980s. In The space between, she uses oils, acrylics, and mixed media to explore liminal boundaries through abstraction, including the spaces between the conscious and the subconscious, between contrasts of dark and light, between creation and destruction, and between shapelessness and form.

Booma works at the canvas, spreading paint with a variety of tools such as squeegees and brayers, adding washes of color, dripping and pouring the paint, adding then subtracting to reveal the opaline presence of layers beneath the surface. Because she works instinctively, responding to the needs of the painting as she goes, it takes on a life of its own. “The painting takes over, becoming what it wants to be”, she says.

Whether with oils, acrylics, or cold wax, Booma excavates, like an archeologist, peeling back layers of time and giving the viewer a glimpse into the history of a painting’s creation, which adds to a given composition’s sense of depth. But the sense of space within each painting, even if one work feels smaller and more intimate and another more open and expansive, there is a pervasive sense of always being someplace to explore.

Booma studied at the University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts and the College of New Rochelle in New York. She’s won numerous awards for her work including awards for painting from the Essex Art Association in Essex, Connecticut; a Connecticut Women Artists Award from the John Slade Ely, House in New Haven, Connecticut; an invitational to the Dubuque Museum of Art in Kearney, Nebraska; and an invitational to the Museum of Nebraska, which is also in Kearney.

Booma’s work is in many public and corporate art collections, including the ART in Embassies Program, the United States Ambassador to the Holy See in Rome (courtesy of the Department of State), the Union Pacific Railroad, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Enterprise Bank, and the Romani Conti Vineyards in France.