Feature Stories

Professor Sharon Swift’s love of photography developed early. She received her first camera from her father in third grade; something she admits using less for artistic purposes than as an espionage tool against her older sister. 

 

Her father was an avid amateur photographer and returned home from World War II with a large box of images from his duty station in the Bering Sea’s Aleutian Islands. “When we were good, we got to look through the box of photos,” she remembers, a few of which included photo montages similar in style to what Swift now has on display in the Eleanor and Henry Watts Grand Lobby and Gallery of the Goode Fine and Performing Arts Center.

 

Both parents loved the creative arts and dabbled in writing stories, painting, drawing, and sculpture. As children, Swift and her two sisters and brother were each given sketch books, and on most Sunday afternoons the entire family went on sketching expeditions. She particularly remembers a huge field with one very large tree in the middle that became a popular destination for their sketching. 

 

While the line from childhood interests to an adult vocation seems clear, not until a particular graduate school project at the University of Oklahoma did the pieces fall together in a way that led to a sudden “oh,” and she realized her dad’s influence in the development of her love of photography and photo montages.

 

Now in her 19th year at VWU, Swift serves as chair of the Art Department and teaches courses in photography, graphic design, handmade books, and travel photography. She has taught some 6,000 students in her professional career and firmly believes that artists are made, not born. “Students can learn to be artists; motivation counts far more than talent,” she says.

 

As for her own work, she finds that making time to do it is the greatest challenge for a full-time teacher, and calls herself a “teacher making art” rather than an “artist who teaches.” In the meanwhile, she continues her childhood habit and fills sketchbook after sketchbook with drawings, color choices, phrases she likes, and objects she sees or imagines. Ideas in development, all waiting for the right time to come alive. 

 

At the beginning of the summer, she made 35 prints, many quite large, and now they must be painted. Swift has set a goal of completing one each weekend. “I’d stick with photography if I needed immediate gratification, but I don’t,” she says. “I like the process of working on a project, the tactile involvement of playing with the materials and the unexpected bonus that can come from it.”