Mr. Scharf, are you happiest when you are making art?
I love to create. Creation is my joy, and that’s what I love to do every single day. So even though I’m thrilled to exhibit my work and get invited to galleries in different parts of the world, and that is very exciting for me… Yes, what I really love to do most is just be alone in the studio and make art.
Your bright palette, whimsical characters, and playful shapes really capture the joy of that process.
The process can certainly be joyful, but it also depends on my mood. There was a period of a couple years where I did about 400 of those paintings with the faces; even during the pandemic I continued to make them. In those works, there is so much emotion. There’s so much going on all over the world so even when I walk into the studio and I’m feeling unhappy or full of rage, I want to get it out. And art is such a great way to do that. It’s a therapy for me.
“Minimalist art left me with no feeling. And that is, for me, boring. I really seek to feel, I want to feel, and without the feeling, I’m empty.”
What other kinds of emotions do you go through when you’re creating?
In the current exhibition I’m showing at the MAM in Shanghai, which is actually called Emotional, we’ve grouped the pieces into several emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and awe. And I go through all of those emotions when I’m creating! You know, not only am I expressing my emotions, I’m taking them out of me, and I’m conveying how I feel. Feelings are integral for me, that’s what I’m interested in as an artist, and also as someone who likes to look at other art. That’s the kind of art I respond to: art that makes me feel. As an art student in the late seventies and early eighties, a lot of the art that we were being taught In school was conceptual based, minimal, and I just couldn’t connect with it. It just left me with no feeling. And that is, for me, boring. I really seek to feel, I want to feel, and without the feeling, I’m empty. So that’s something I’m really interested in conveying, and always have been.
Is that why your work incorporates eyes and faces and expressions? To better convey that message?
Well, when I was a child, I was really interested in cartoons. I still am! I came across this how-to book when I probably was eight years old, about how to draw cartoons. I remember very distinctly that they had all these different, , circles as the heads and like, if you make the eyes in this way, wow, that’s anger, and then the eyes go like that, and that’s sad. And so at a very early age, I was studying this how-to cartoon book and it really worked! I’m just someone who loves cartoons, I don’t see them as just for kids. I look at it as a real communication, a universal language that transcends cultures and languages. So I really hooked on to that fact, and in a way it was kind of rebellious because cartoons are seen as not important because they’re not serious. So it became even more exciting to me to really delve into what you’re not supposed to do in art
That seems like a mantra for your practice in general. Your Cosmic Cavern installations similarly disrupt the norm in the art world by utilizing plastic and waste as raw materials.
Right, when I first moved to New York, I became obsessed with all of the garbage in the street. We’d find furniture, clothes… I would be thinking, “This is great art material,” but I didn’t really have a plan for any of it. I started focusing on all these great finds and later on, making art out of plastic and refuse from the beach where I was living in Brazil. I started placing these objects in a room, with a black light and some fluorescent painted elements — at the time, I was living near Times Square, which is a very crazy neighborhood of traffic and noise, and it was just hard to find peace. But I created this escapist environment out of the chaos. It felt almost like nature because I could just kind of lose myself the way one can lose themselves in nature. It was my own little refuge from the outside world with this black light. And as time went on, it kept growing and growing, I made different incarnations. It’s just an evolving thing. Now I’m even doing an iteration which is like a sunshine cabinet called Beach Club, that uses natural light and plants.
You mentioned starting off without any real plan, and I know that remains your approach these days. How is it for you to work in such a spontaneous way?
The unknown is exciting. I have made paintings in the past, where I drew it out, which can be a pleasure. But most of the time, what I really love is the unknown, letting things outside of myself take me on a journey. Sometimes I think pre-planning is almost like homework, and homework is boring! I don’t want to do homework. I love the journey from the white nothing canvas to the end of the painting, and sometimes, since it’s not planned, it starts to go somewhere else and I can think, “Oh, where is this going?” I learn from mistakes and from the unknown, I build a trust outside of myself, and every single time I’m over the moon with excitement. It’s a constant exploration, and it’s a constant learning, and that is what excites me.
Apparently when you do live paintings, people will sometimes stop by and think the piece is finished when you’ve only just painted the background.
Yes! (Laughs) I mean sometimes I even think, “Wow, that could be a finished painting by someone else.” Sometimes I think I should leave it and make a new name for myself and show these separately. But I am who I am, and I don’t do that. I just keep going and going and going. It’s almost excessive. There is one point where I know when I’m done. But I love to keep going, and it’s kind of for a morbid reason. Let’s say I’m making a mural outside, and the public is looking at this, if I can look up at it and think, “Well, that looks pretty good like that. If I died tonight, that wouldn’t look like an unfinished piece,” that’s great. I want to present it like each step of the journey could be a finished piece.
How is it for you to finally finish a piece? Is there a sense of relief that that journey is over?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s a great feeling to let go. There it is! It’s like giving birth, right? I mean, I’ve never physically given birth, but making a painting is like having a baby.
Do you feel like now, at almost 70, you still have that kind of endless creative energy?
I really do. I feel like I’m just beginning. You start with nothing, and then there is this creation, and it’s very satisfying. I rely on my skills and my own history and the things that I love, that I’m obsessed with. I feel they’re coming from somewhere else, and they come through me, and they come out of me. Often people ask me, “What do you do when you have an artist block?” I’ve never had an one, because I reach out into the universe, and the universe is so infinite. I’ve been working every day for decades, and it feels pretty great that all my dreams are actually starting to happen. It fuels me. When no one cared about my art, that didn’t stop me, love it or hate it, it is who I am. Art is who I am and what I do, and I’m going to keep doing it. I really am just at the beginning.