Photorealistic chocolate art

By: Samantha Downing
This piece was posted on the Faces of Richmond blog.

A local artist paints what she is passionate about - chocolate.

Chocolate Hershey’s kisses sit partially unwrapped on a tall, 12-inch-square black table, with two lights and a camera staring at them.

No one is planning to eat this candy.

The chocolate kisses are the subject of Sharon Lalik’s current paintings – actually, the photographs of the kisses are.

“I’m a photorealist artist. I do paintings of photographs,” Lalik explained. “The subject matter is the photograph; it is not what is in the photograph.”

Lalik, a former Virginia Commonwealth University art student, has always painted realistically. Recently, she has been using her own photographs of chocolate as the subjects for her paintings.

“I’d always go to the store … I’d always grab a piece of chocolate,” she said. “I realized I love chocolate – I really love chocolate. Maybe I should just start painting some paintings that have chocolate in them.”

She took her passion for chocolate and reflective surfaces and turned it into art. Part of the reason Lalik paints chocolate is that it’s unique.

Also, she said, “Who could not love a chocolate kiss? So I figured, you know, if nothing else, people will love my pieces. It’s chocolate!”

Lalik attended VCU for Communcation Arts and Design, but was unable to finish after she broke her hand in a car accident.

Not knowing if she would ever be able to paint again, Lalik designed and sewed clothing, window treatments and a variety of other materials.

“The only thing I could do right-handed was cut, so it saved me,” she said.

It was 10 years before she started painting again, even though she never gave up drawing. She started with watercolors but eventually went back into oil painting.

Lalik said the sewing she did strengthened her hand so she could hold a paintbrush. Now she paints four hours each day.

“I have been an artist all my life, ever since I can remember,” Lalik said.

Her sister Sandra White said Lalik would be pulled out of classes in high school to work on the art for school dances and other functions. This happened so often that White had to tutor her in some classes.

“You’d always see Sharon in the big hallway with her paper rolled out, drawing,” White laughed.

She also said that Lalik is accident prone, can’t cook and should have been a therapist.

“She can tell me everything that’s wrong with my life. She can tell me everything I should be doing,” White said. “Unfortunately, most of the time she’s right.”

But, White added, Lalik is very good at making people feel good about themselves and encouraging them.

As a painter, Lalik is very detail-oriented.

“Everything has to be perfect,” White said. “I think she oversimplifies it because she does put a lot of her emotion into the piece. She just tries to hide that she does.”

Lalik’s inspiration for painting is the ability to help people see things in a different way.

“What inspires me is to do a painting that gives another person another set of eyes,” she said with a smile. “They see things they never saw before.”

Being an artist isn’t always fun and games and chocolate.

“I have to get up in the morning and make myself paint just like somebody else has to go to work,” Lalik said. “And some days I’d rather clean the toilet than paint.”

But, she went on to say, painting is a part of who she is – not just what she does.

“It’s like weaved fabric, like it’s part of your being.”

Lalik’s paintings have been sold and shown in a number of different places, including in VCU’s art center.

In a March art show, Lalik plans to feature 25 pieces. Many will be paintings of chocolate, some of which are not even painted yet.

She is also trying to get into the Meisel Gallery in New York, named after the man who coined the term “photorealism” during a time when abstract was the most popular form of painting.

“Nobody used a photograph to paint by,” Lalik said. “It was like the biggest sin across the art world.”

Even today, many artists still do not respect photorealism as an art.

“They feel it should all come from your heart,” Lalik said. “I think anything you do comes from your heart.”


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