Papillon Design just landed on Art Gecko’s old space at 19 Harrison, and it looks like another great addition to the Oak Park Arts District. In this vibrant, colorful studio, Papillon’s owner, Sharron Ott, not only glorifies the walls with her large, inspiring paintings, but she also teaches art classes, hosts performance art events, and participates in OPAD’s Third Fridays Gallery Walk every month.
Although the studio’s Grand Opening was in November 2010, Papillon Design, which offers fine art for sale, interior design services, and art classes, has actually been in business for fourteen years. Originally called Ott Fine Art, Ott changed the name in 2000 to Papillon, which is French for “butterfly.”
Interestingly, it was around this time that Ott found herself metamorphosing into an interior decorator after four years as an “artist on tour” and a “costume mistress” for Cirque Du Soliel. During this adventure on the road, she began painting large surfaces for theater sets, a skill she further developed—to eventually create entire scenic environments—while working at Steppenwolf Theater and other scenic shops, including Red Moon Theater.
Merging her talents and experience, she launched a full-service interior design business in 2001 that provides floor plans, furniture selections, window treatments, and wall treatments (murals). Her projects have included numerous residential properties; over forty restaurants and nightclubs, including Papaspiro’s, here in Oak Park; and a variety of churches, including St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Chicago, as well as retail stores.
In 2007 Ott discovered yet another passion: teaching. Over the past few years she has instructed young children, teenagers, and adults in the fundamentals of art. Color Theory Science and Application is a class that she particularly enjoys teaching, and she delights at a child’s pure process of creation. Ott, who began seriously painting and drawing at the age of eleven, has found that “adults have many layers of injury which need to heal before the soul is allowed direct access to the canvas. The art becomes therapy in a most affective way.”
Through all of the twists and turns in her career, including a stint as a weekend bartender when she was painting full time right after college, Ott has always continued to make paintings. Sometimes she randomly mixes mediums, and often she uses oil paint. “I am most known for a style that is a flowing interpretation of the human form in motion, but surprisingly I also paint in the Dutch/Gothic Renaissance way,” she said.
For Ott, a graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago, art is a continuous quest for the spirit, which one can see in her liturgical paintings, some of which are passionate; others, soaring. “My goal is to become closer to God,” she said. “I hope that the paintings serve as trailblazers and travel guides into realms of higher consciousness.” In an excerpt from her artist statement online, which is actually a poem, she explains that “What I have shown is a view through / One tiny window in a Universal spectrum / Of possibilities / What one needs to do is focus in. The power is here.”
With over thirty public exhibitions of her own work over her career, Ott believes that her job as a teacher is to give students the capacity to express their personal voice through studying the principles and fundamentals of art. “I have seen my students grow significantly after gaining knowledge obtained from the curriculum,” she said. “I have been privileged to instruct a number of wonderfully gifted students.”
This spring Ott will be offering Fundamentals of Drawing and Painting, Advanced Painting, Color Theory, and Explorations for Children. She also offers private lessons and hosts OPAD summer camps. All in an effort to help others learn to spread their wings too.
For more information about the artist and her work, visit www.papillondesign.biz or email Sharron Ott at sharron@papillondesign.biz.
This story was originally published in the the Buzz Café newsletter and is reprinted here with permission.
