"King Kamehameha I" Painting

Marshall Sharpe is a California-based painter whose work explores queer joy, intimacy, desire, and belonging within the landscapes of California. His paintings place the male figure within swimming pools, coastlines, mountains, gardens, and other spaces of leisure and escape, presenting queer life as tender, sensual, and fully embedded in the natural world.

Working primarily in oil and acrylic, Sharpe combines expressive color, loose brushwork, and carefully observed figures to create scenes that move between lived experience, memory, and imagined possibility. His work considers visibility and vulnerability while emphasizing pleasure, connection, and joy as forms of resistance.

Sharpe received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Professor of Art and Director of the Hartnell College Art Gallery in Salinas, California.

His work has been presented nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in South Korea and the NYC Phoenix Art Collective in New York. His work has also appeared at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, and California State University, Long Beach.