Portland-based Sharon Servilio is one of our longtime favorite humans and artists. She has graciously agreed to be our first interviewee. At Take the Mantel, we have the lofty goal of writing one smashing, descriptive sentence to introduce viewers to each artists' work. When we begin to write about Sharon's work, however, we find our sentences lengthening and entangling. We add "ands" until the sentence becomes a paragraph becomes a page and on and on. This failed endeavor may speak to our writing skills, but it also suggests the expansive, polymathic quality of Sharon's work. We love Sharon's acute ability to link personal histories to universal bodies of knowledge, disrupting conventional notions of time, history and painting alike. Many thanks to Sharon for the generosity of her responses and allowing us a small glimpse into the mind of one of our favorite contemporary artists.