Bio

Sharlene Cline inhales the complicated world around her and responds to it with her art. From distilling nature, like sparrows perched on fireweed, to its essence and Chi, or breath of life, to conversing with world issues like tolerance and climate change. She achieves this through layers of Chinese brushwork, decorative paper, and acrylics.
After a couple of decades, 2016 was the last season for Sharlene as a restaurateur, pastry chef, and sommelier, since then she has completed a new body of work of playful collages. Currently she is delving into her new project Women in Layers, a visual look at the hidden layers of individuals.

Sharlene’s extensive travels around the world has informed her artwork, starting from her move in 1977 from Montreal to Miami, when she was 10 years old, to working with the Mapuche in southern Chile to bird watching in Borneo, from riding a camel through the Thar desert in Rajasthan, India to hanging out with Shona stone sculptors in Tengenenge Village, Zimbabwe.

Sharlene was first introduced to the US west coast when she flew across the country to attend Lewis & Clark College in Portland, where she took her first art class, “Technical Drawing for the Theatre.” While studying in Ecuador, on a Lewis & Clark school program, she learned about World College West, transferred, and then graduated with a BA in her continuous interest of Meaning, Culture, and Change. But it was during her three year studies with master Chinese painter Yang O-Shi in Taiwan that developed her Chi brushstrokes and sense of composition and identified herself as an artist.

She has exhibited locally and nationally, including “The Spirit of the Copper River” at the Valdez Museum, Valdez, AK, "Ties Us Together" exhibit at the Pratt Museum, Homer, AK; "Moving Towards Center" project in Homer, Alaska, as well as at the Intercultural Museum Art Gallery in Baltimore, and the Dadian Gallery at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C. Her enjoyment of working with students extends to curating kid art shows, teaching art, especially Chinese brushwork, to children with the Alaska Artist for Schools program. She is represented in numerous private collections including the Cordova Museum, Alaska, Canada, Ecuador, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Taiwan and United States.

Sharlene lives in picturesque Homer, Alaska with her family.