Artist Sunny Mullarkey finds her bright spot in her new collection of paintings
The world may aptly call Sunny Mullarkey an artist, but at heart, she is an explorer.
Natural curiosity drives Mullarkey’s exploration of color, which took flight a decade ago with black-and-white linocut prints that precisely depicted natural flora and fauna. To these, she eventually added deep, saturated hues such as indigo and forest green.
Her color choices took a turn for the brighter around 2020 with bold geometrically inspired prints. “The world kept getting darker, but my colors kept getting brighter,” she recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘It’s time for rainbows,’ and the brighter my work got, the happier I was.”
Her subjects shifted again three years ago when her mother developed dementia and moved in with Mullarkey and her husband and three children. That’s when vibrant, larger-than-life blossoms began to bloom in her work. “I just needed flowers, the comfort of nature,” she shares.
Solace in Earth and Sky, Mullarkey’s newest body of work, comprises acrylic paintings on canvas. Working in her home studio, she imagines abstract landscapes that suggest the infinite skies and flat marshes surrounding Beaufort, South Carolina, where she grew up. “The Lowcountry is the most beautiful place in the world,” the artist says. “Those big skies, those ever-changing coastlines and sea islands shifting. I started reflecting on that.”
Sunny Mullarkey Finds Solace in Color
The result? Paintings exploding with color that stops viewers in their tracks. She has transitioned from the literal imagery of printmaking to “achieving an experience on the canvas.” “My main focus in printmaking was the layering of colors and textures, and I’ve figured out that’s what I really love and it doesn’t matter what medium I use to achieve those color and texture layers.”
In lieu of brushes, Mullarkey uses small plastic spreaders to push the paint across a canvas. Texture controls and shapes the colors and their degree of transparency. “I’ll put a color on and pull it across the texture and it lets the higher peaks of texture pull through but concentrates color in the lower areas,” she explains.
Ever the optimist, Mullarkey’s constant search for “the light and joy of things” shines through in her art. “I want [my work] to inspire joy,” she says. “I want to be able to express . . . my curiosity, my silliness, my playfulness, my sense of awe and wonder of the natural world . . . . I want to make the world a more beautiful place in every way that I can.”
Reflecting on her artistic journey over the past decade, she admits that experimenting can be scary and things don’t always work as she hopes they will. Even so, she’s proud of herself for being vulnerable enough to try new things and be willing to fail.
“When I get to the point where I’ve achieved my goal in a way of expression, that is super-fulfilling to me,” Mullarkey shares. “I’m in no way finished, but I’ve climbed a creative mountain and I’m sitting on the top now to see where else I can go.”
A Different Perspective
For Sunny Mullarkey, inspiration can come just as easily from a walk in the woods as a cross-country trip. Case in point, her collage work was born from a trip to Denver she took with her husband years ago. Peering down at a patchwork of farmland from the plane, Sunny was struck by the overview effect of seeing the land from a perspective she would never have from the ground. “That shifted a whole bunch of things for me,” she reveals. “So many shapes came out of that. And out of that is where all the layering of colors happened.”
Find Sunny Mullarkey’s work in Spoonbill Gallery and decorating the walls in LaRue Fine Chocolate, both in the Village of West Greenville. Her new collection, Solace in Earth and Sky, will be released online October 20 at sunnymullarkey.com.
