Sharon Maczko

Sharon Maczko

It's strange how a seemingly insignificant experience as a youngster made such a lasting impression on me that it affected the way I create.

There was a beautiful mansion built around the turn of the century near the neighborhood I lived in as a child in Michigan; consequently, as years passed, the empty house and surrounding acreage were eventually donated to a church. The church left the doors to the mansion unlocked, and my sister and I would let ourselves in to walk quietly in awe of the many abandoned rooms; void of any furniture and deathly silent in their faded, but still grandiose, splendor.

Helped along by the fog of memory, those rooms have taken on a dream-like quality in my adult life, and for years those memories have inspired me to create interior scenes in my studio that I reproduce into paintings. Painting interior scenes morphed into painting somewhat traditional still lifes, but they still possess the hushed stillness of those rooms.