Girl Power Aglow in Gold

Isabella Al-Sharif is an exotic name Tallahassee is getting used to. In just under a year as the programming coordinator and curator of LeMoyne Arts in downtown Tallahassee, she has selected art for a half dozen exhibitions. In addition, Al-Sharif has brought her own art to the Capital City, works so dramatic and unexpected that collectors can’t get enough.

Al-Sharif was born on a Marine base in North Carolina and raised in South Carolina. And while she now has an arresting presence, her introduction to the world was a difficult one, she says. She was born with hydrocephalus, a condition characterized by excess fluid, called cerebral spinal fluid or CSF, in the brain, according to the Hydrocephalus Association. Her parents were told her brain was damaged and that she would likely not walk or talk. But her mother had a different plan.

“My mother introduced me to art and plays and read to me … all to increase the synapses in my brain,” says
Al-Sharif. These interventions seemed to have not only helped with any disabilities she had, but the art itself gave her a “place to go and to grow.” Though she was a shy introvert, creating became a joyous way to cope.

Sitting elegantly on the porch of the LeMoyne Arts museum, wearing a soft lavender blouse, intricate agate and silver jewelry, sparkling purple stones in her ears, and fuchsia on her lips, Al-Sharif recalls how through the exigencies of life she came to her artistic purpose.

“I was 19, still in college at the College of Charleston, when I met then married a ‘pen pal,’” she recounts. “He was a few years older and lived in Jordan, in the Middle East.”

Photo by Alicia Osborne

Still finishing school, she summered in her husband’s home country, sometimes Saudi Arabia. “After six years we returned to the States, where I worked at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago.” While there, she was surrounded by the ancient art of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And, the couple had a daughter.

“Somehow, bringing this child into the world was an awakening for me … in many ways. Artistically, though I had been doing art for years, I had not found my own voice, my own style, the vocabulary in which I could truly speak. But with her, there was an epiphany. It was as if she had awakened a spirit insideme that could connect to the outside world. I became truly passionate as I seemed to now be able to listen in both places.”

By the time the couple moved to Tallahassee, Al-Sharif was producing art like nothing Tallahasseans had seen before. Clad in sweat pants and seated on the floor of her home (first in a bedroom, then later a sunlit enclosed porch), Al-Sharif began crafting 40-by-60-inch paintings that glowed with gold leaf—images of women, powerful, prayerful, formidable, garbed in exotic patterned tunics and robes, with peacocks and coiling snakes at their feet. They boasted symbols and latticed representations that might be from medieval iconography. And there was passion on full display.

Earlier, unused to exhibiting her work, Al-Sharif had been hesitant to open herself to the public’s gaze. Now her full-scale acrylic works would be on view at the Airport Gallery, The Plant artist’s collective, 621 Gallery, and LeMoyne Arts, where she was the featured artist in the “Her Temple” exhibition.

Photo by Alicia Osborne

“I love bold colors, layering them, surrounding them with gold,” Al-Sharif describes. She laughs as she speaks of her love of Gustav Klimt, and how the use of his same gold leaf leaves little trails of “Tinkerbell” glitter across her studio floor.

But for an artist who also holds an important museum job, there are times when she needs to dress up. “I think I’m drawn to the same powerful colors that I use for the powerful women in my work. For receptions, I might choose a purple cocktail dress or something in brilliant red.”

She says an “eccentric and eclectic” aunt has been her couture inspiration. “She dressed as if to say, ‘You have only one life; enjoy all of it!’”

Al-Sharif again reverts to the women in her paintings, speaking as if they were sisters, “When I paint these women … I often feel I am channeling them. It is a spiritual experience.” And her own style seems to have grown from those she paints.

And whether Al-Sharif is listening to a Shankar sitar recording on her headphones as she paints or presiding over a glittering opening-night reception, she might very well be any one of the figures on her canvases—strong, bold, and brave.