A Creative Life

A Creative Life is filled with the tools and philosophy of the creative process. With a timeless message retentive to all who seek to express themselves creatively, readers will be able to use the tools to develop their skills in a creatively expressive world.

About the Author

Barry William Scharf is a master painter, sculptor, photographer and professor of art with a history of creating award-winning art and exhibition installations from the late 60's to present. He has been making art for over 55 years with over 25 public and one-man shows at museums and galleries internationally.

From 1996 to 2014, Barry taught in the Design, Photography, and Animation Departments at the Art Institute of Seattle. He was a semifinalist in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards for both 2011 and 12 in the "Innovation in Traditional Media in Education" as well as a Guru Award Finalist Artistic Award winner 2001 from the National Association of Photoshop Professionals.

In 1973, he attended East Carolina University, receiving a BFA, then attended Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California, where he won the prestigious Hancock Park Art Award for excellence in painting. Barry graduated from Otis Art Institute with a M. F. A. in 1975.

In 1980, Scharf was chosen for a federally funded C.E.T.A. project, to use artists in community renewal projects. As part of a group of 12 artists they created Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. LACE became a major force in the revitalization of the inner city of Los Angeles by providing a forum to bring artist's downtown into the unoccupied buildings. LACE created low rent studios of a size suitable to the serious artist. Within the first year this effort infused the L.A. art scene to such an extent that it resulted in an influx of architects and other professionals and the gallery is still running today.

Barry William Scharf is an artist whose work is centered in expressing the spiritual within nature and life. He paints his visions through both abstract imagery and a poetic narrative reality. In this way, the viewer is encouraged to experience feelings as visual imagery, sound as color, and prayer as composition.

In 2015 his photo work was included as part of the International Exposure Awards shown in New York and at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

In 2019-2020 his work was honored with a career retrospective at Utah Tech Museum in St George Utah. This one-man exhibition spanned over 50 years of his artworks.