Johnsburg Artist Creates Ornate Hats in Honor of Late Mom
Lauren Sharp founded Art for Adrienne in honor of her late mother, Adrienne Paradise. Throughout the month of May, National Mental Health Awareness Month, Sharp will dedicate 10 percent of sales of her hand-etched hats to the National Alliance on Mental Illness of McHenry County, Illinois.
This piece contains topics such as mental health and substance abuse struggles, and suicide, that some readers may find upsetting.
Johnsburg Artist Creates Ornate Hats in Honor of Late Mom
Mere minutes after Lauren Sharp placed several of the wide-brimmed fedoras she hand-etches on a back table at a McHenry coffee shop, curious onlookers couldn’t help themselves.
“I love these!” exclaimed McHenry resident Dana Ferguson, who had stopped by Toast & Roast with her friend David Arroyo of Grayslake.
“I could tell when I saw her face she’s an artist,” added Arroyo. “I had to come ask about these hats.”
Over the next hour, between visits with others drawn to gaining a more up-close glimpse of her intricately crafted headgear, Sharp, of Johnsburg, explained the motivation behind the name of her home-based business, Art for Adrienne.
It is an homage to Sharp’s mother, a talented artist herself, who committed suicide in 2009 at age 47. Sharp was just 19. The death followed years of tumult, as Adrienne Paradise battled mental health and substance abuse struggles, said Sharp. This May, during National Mental Health Awareness Month, Sharp will dedicate 10 percent of all of her sales to the National Alliance on Mental Illness of McHenry County. She also is donating one of her fanciful chapeau to NAMI for its May gala.
“Lauren’s hats are gorgeous and her talent and passion for her craft is evident in every single piece,” said Abbey Nicholas, executive director of NAMI McHenry County. “NAMI is so honored to feature a one-of-a-kind donated hat in our Sunset Gala auction ... Lauren’s personal story reminds us that we are all touched by mental health, and her generosity will help ensure that everyone in our community has access to free mental health services.”
Sharp said she is grateful to have formed a connection with Nicholas and NAMI.
“This is an opportunity to spread some positivity, turn some bad things that have happened in my life into good,” Sharp said. “I love seeing people wear my art, and I love helping women feel beautiful. I’m hoping that, in working with Abbey, it will also help to bring healing to others.”
Sharp, who turns 36 on May 7, takes blank, wide-brimmed, “vegan” fedoras of various hues and, using a wood-burning technique known as pyrography, engraves them with a range of free-handed, imaginative, feminine or fierce designs. A gallery may be viewed and orders placed at artforadrienne.com.
Ranging in price from about $75 to $110, some of her designs are subtle, featuring rose petals and vines, while on others, alligators lurk or a moon casts its shadow across a desolate landscape. Acrylic paints provide an extra pop of color to some. Others bear beading and lacy ribbon, while still others show off feathers, leather braids or ropes of rough-cut stone. Even the undersides of Sharp’s brims delight.
Between the visits from curious passers-by, Sharp spoke openly about both her own mental health challenges and the one that ultimately took her mother’s life.
As Sharp and her three siblings were growing up in McHenry and Wonder Lake, she said, their mother struggled off and on with alcohol abuse. “At times, I was mad at her,” Sharp said. “But when she was well, she had such a shining personality. She truly lit up a room. She was amazingly talented artistically. She’d take an old, dilapidated antique and give it a new life. Whether it was a rock or a piece of wood, she could paint it and make something truly beautiful out of it.
“She was also a muralist,” Sharp continued, adding that her mother served in the U.S. Army from 1984 to 1986, meeting her husband, John Paradise, while both were stationed in Germany. “She painted my whole bedroom wall this beautiful ocean theme with dolphins and fish and coral. My friends would come over and they were so jealous.”
About a year before Adrienne Paradise died, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She began treatment, and for the next 12 months, doctors tried to dial in an effective regimen, her daughter said.
However, one early morning in March 2009, John Paradise ran screaming into Lauren’s room. Adrienne Paradise had swallowed a bottle of Tylenol after a day-long bender. She was alive, but unconscious. A day later, her organs failing, Adrienne was removed from life support, and died.
The experience left Lauren Sharp — who fought mental health demons of her own — fearful. “I always struggled so bad,” said Sharp, “but I was scared to get help.”
Years later, after the birth of her second child, in 2022, Lauren Sharp suffered severe postpartum depression. Her husband, Landon Sharp, and his mother persuaded Lauren to see a mental health professional. And she is so grateful they did.
“For the past year, I have felt like a whole new person” she said. “I’m mad that I waited this long.”
Sharp said the grief that follows the suicide of a close family member is pitted with guilt. At the time of her mother’s death, Sharp and her sister were “just getting into trouble,” she said, tearing up as she wondered aloud whether she’d done anything by then to make her mother proud. Sharp also often wonders how her mother’s life might have progressed had the artist survived.
“She died before social media took off and before Etsy was a thing,” Sharp said. “I can just imagine what she could be doing today in a world where it is so much easier to have your art seen.”
Of at least one thing, Sharp has grown supremely assured.
“Getting help is the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “I don’t know if this feeling will ever go away that there’s a big piece of my heart missing. But now that I’m doing things to benefit my mental health, and making art that I know would make my mom proud, I feel like that hole is filling.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 49,000 Americans committed suicide and 1.5 million attempted it in 2023, the last year for which statistics are noted on the website. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. The lifeline offers judgment-free support for mental health crises, substance use and more. Text, call or chat 988.