There are artists who need a deft hand for the potter's wheel. There are artists who need delicate sable hair brushes to create fine lines upon their canvas. And then there is Sharon Gainsburg who goes at her work with a jackhammer.
She dons a painter's suit, goggles and earplugs and revs up a power saw. The sculptor tackles raw stone with machines before relying on her hands to coax out the finishing curves.
"For the first 16 years I did this, I did it all just with hand chisels," the Summerlin resident said. "Not anymore."
Her abstract sculpture may start out with a jack hammer but by the time Gainsburg gets to the final polish, her piece is just as painstaking, just as meticulous as any other artist's detailed work. A lot of people feel drawn to touch her sculptures and let their hands follow the lines of her work.
"Tactile people say they just have to touch it, not just look at it," she said. "I encourage it. It helps people appreciate the form, feel the energy."
She just received 1,800 pounds of alabaster, a soft marble that she had located in a quarry in Utah. The stone sits in the rear portion of her showroom, 1039 Main St.
The building is distinct. It has colorful paint spatters on the outside with a huge tube of paint on the roof, its contents dripping down the building. The back part of the building is where students come for workshops. The 30-foot-by-20-foot room is unassuming in a cover of new white paint. It has wood braces reaching up to the ceiling and the floor is painted concrete. The area is ripe for the flurry of creative energy that emerges with each workshop.
Her intriguing pieces are all the more notable when you learn Gainsburg was not always an artist and in fact, never attended art school or even paid much attention to her creative side.
As a young woman in the 1960s she began a career as a medical technician. She was living in New Jersey, working in a lab, which specialized in microbiology issues. It wasn't until the early 1970s that she took up art. Even then, it was only as a hobby.
Stonework "scared me a little," she said, "But I got a lot of encouragement."
Less than 10 years after that tentative start, stone carving was her profession. She said she learned to let the stone dictate how it should be carved.
Her work appeared in shows and she was being approached to do commissioned pieces. One of those was a National Foundation of Infectious Disease award, given to C. Everett Koop, former surgeon general.
The award needed an artist who understood the double helix of DNA and Gainsburg's knowledge of microbiology clinched that first commission. The foundation was so pleased with her work, she created all the subsequent annual awards, which went to other notable people like former president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, the late Arthur Ashe and Elizabeth Dole.
Since then, she has exhibited widely throughout the United States and her work has been placed in many corporate collections such as Nabisco, NJ Power & Light and USA Today.
Throughout her career she has mixed travel with her art and spent summers in Italy, sculpting.
Gainsburg averages 10 sculptures a year. Some of her work can be seen at her showroom downtown.
Her pieces generally run in the $1,200 to $7,500 range.
"Many times, I'll say (to a buyer), 'Take it home and live with it for a couple days. Then, if you don't like it, bring it back,' " she said. "They never bring it back."
This summer, Gainsburg moved to Summerlin to be near her grown children. She immediately began setting up her showroom, which features other artists' work as well as her own.
Her many students in New York and New Jersey were orphaned when she moved to Las Vegas so she plans to offer a five-day workshop for them in February, a mini-reunion of sorts in a fun city.
"It was always inside me," she said of her talent. "I have no academic background for this. I've taken no art classes. But there was always my own passion and discipline and a voice inside me that said, 'This is what you've got to do.' "
For more information about Gainsburg's work or classes, visit her Web site at www.gainsburgstudio.com.
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