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SHARON BOOMA THE UNSAID THOUGHT

Fighting Just to be Still 2026, oil on canvas, 48”

x 48”

SHARON BOOMA THE UNSAID THOUGHT

Sharon Booma’s new body of work, The Unsaid Thought, celebrates a radiant distillation of an established painterly vocabulary, and yields yet again profound, magical and luminous imagery.

Each canvas is built through an iterative application of diverse media, including oil paint, acrylic, and cold wax, fluid washes, poured pigments, silkscreen elements, and collage. The canvas functions not merely as a passive plane to receive an image, but as a dimensional topography capable of recording time, gesture, and physical resistance beneath the skin of the paint.

Booma’s methodology would seem to be a process of systematic excavation. Initial applications of broad brayers, squeegees, and expansive brushwork are subjected to scraping, etching, and gouging. Utilizing various hand tools, the upper strata of wet and semi-dry media are stripped away to expose the previous layers buried beneath the surface. This technique leverages the concept of pentimento—the visible presence of earlier statements and hidden structures altered during the creative process.

The resolution of each composition emerges through a physical dialogue with the medium; rapid, intuitive marks made by the artist’s hand must constantly react to the heavy, tactile resistance of oil and cold wax. This is often a rigorous struggle—what Booma describes as a “fight” to find the work’s true voice. In the course of making, she frequently discovers isolated passages of striking surface beauty, only to make the courageous decision to scrape them away or paint them over in service of searching for a more resolved, holistic unity across the entire canvas. The resulting clarity resists containment by a singular interpretation.

Because these works do not track linear narratives, they function instead as open, alluring spaces that invite the mind to wander, acting as catalysts for personal perception. These paintings evoke a sense of profound spiritual radiance. In works such as Connecting and Skipping and Wears the Shape of the Wind, grounding structural elements and horizontal geometric baselines create an interactive dialogue with the viewer,

providing a familiar reference to a literal, terrestrial plane. The anchoring functions as an essential threshold; by pinning the initial composition to a stable, structural pediment, Booma establishes a baseline balance from which the painting can organically build. In Wears the Shape of the Wind , a dense, dark foundation weighs the lower register countering and ultimately releasing the vaporous, atmospheric currents moving above it. Here, the spiritual dimension reveals itself through an act of profound artistic faith: the heavy, foundational base serves as a structural anchor, proving that true luminosity is achieved not by evading density, but by grounding the composition so the upper strata can break open into light.

Throughout the wider presentation of The Unsaid Thought , however, Booma also chooses to systematically remove these terrestrial markers, freeing the compositions to expand outward. This liberation from the horizon shifts the work into an otherworldly domain—not in a scientific or cosmic sense, but a meditative one. This mirrors the spatial mechanics of long-standing, cross-cultural artistic traditions, such as the flat, goldleaf environments of Early Renaissance icon paintings or the sacred spaces of Tibetan Buddhist Tangkas, for example, —where the absence of a background forces the viewer to look inward rather than looking into a simulated landscape. In Booma’s contemporary practice, as in those historic lineages, the systematic denial of receding horizon lines serves an identical meditative purpose: it disorients the viewer’s earthly perspective, shifting the encounter from an external observation of a grounded scene to an internal immersion within a plane of pure contemplation.

This formal shift manifests with particular strength in pivotal, standalone canvases such as A Garment of Praise and Silver Current in the Air, which break decisively the compositional structure of grounded scenes to command a singular, independent presence. In these works, separate and disjointed painterly elements are bound together by a unifying deployment of blue. In A Garment of Praise , a luminous field of cerulean envelops a complex, central architecture of shifting marks and buried collage elements, suspended above a stark white ground to offer a visual sanctuary of profound stillness and peace.

Booma’s aesthetic approach is further clarified in the three panels of Just Keep Going I, Just Keep Going II, and Just Keep Going III, which operate as a family of relatable, standalone works. This sequence emerges from a specific technical methodology: Booma initiates the works utilizing an acrylic base, physically adhering hand-made prints directly onto the canvas support before transitioning into the fluid, expressive properties of oil and wax. Though sharing an identical underlying scale and gestural proportion, each of the three panels establishes a distinct physical identity through its specific textures and marks, mapping separate moments in time.

A similar thematic arc links Feel This. and Know This. , which seem to function as sister works with a consistency of palette and compositional weight. In Feel This, the composition introduces an active, questioning movement dominated by a massive, central field of golden amber that hovers over a dark, gestural base. In contrast, Know This appears to strive toward formal resolution. The warm tones float into space like embers.

This sensory convergence finds its peak in A Glory Stretch of Light . Here, the viewer is embraced by a warm field of illumination where rhythmic incised markings, repetitive scratches, and cross-like shapes gravitate to the center of the composition, forming a rhythmic grid. These elements cluster around a prominent horizontal datum line that functions conceptually as a musical staff, anchoring the gestures in time and tone. This musical reading aligns with Booma’s studio environment, where repetitive markmaking often acts as a direct, physical transcription of classical cadence of the music playing in the studio while she paints. The physical depth of these marks records the speed of their creation, causing an evocative sense of acoustics to emanate directly from the stratified surface—as if the sound has been preserved in the paint

Booma’s works reflect a disciplined studio journey. They remain visually alive, offering an open territory where the mind is invited to wander. They also stand as masterfully composed silent, luminous sanctuaries - proving that the physical properties of the medium can be resolved into a profound space of quiet contemplation, providing an expansive topography where the complexities of human experience are given room to exist in peace.

-Daniel Zeese