About
Sara grew up in a household overflowing with music, arts and crafts. Holidays were spent learning whatever new craft her wonderful mum had just mastered.
She began her tertiary education with a business degree from Waikato and after working in marketing and accounting and travelling with her husband, she began her own creative life as a mum at home with three kids.
Experience from painting and art history classes inspired Sara to complete a contemporary visual arts diploma which was quite a shift in focus from the representational art she had been doing. With the idea of becoming a primary school art teacher, Sara later completed a graduate diploma in teaching (primary). Instead of teaching she became an enthusiastic art guide at Auckland Art Gallery while continuing her painting practice.
Currently, alongside her practice, Sara enjoys supporting an art group for people with dementia. A local poetry meet provides an opportunity to share written creations with other novice (and not so novice) poets. Besides the arts, Sara’s interests are family, friends, walking and travelling.
Artist’s Statement
My work involves building up layers of colour, texture and form, whilst allowing my intuition and aesthetic to fight it out on a linear space, resolving the complexities of the possibilities presented.
I’m strongly influenced by colour, feeling surges of emotion when experiencing colour in the same way as when I listen to beautiful music. Artists among the Impressionists, Fauves, and Abstract Expressionists who expressed themselves through immodest, yet considered use, of riotous colour inspire me.
Nature inspires me also and the visual aspects of nature often move me deeply. I love finding forms and colours in the natural world to use in my paintings - a mountain contour, the shape of a petal or the transparency of a new spring oak leaf.
I find it fun to throw together organic forms with geometric shapes, the jarring contrast makes me feel alive. It’s fun to create a new, unique landscape from my memory and imagination.
