Sarah Stone is a North American contemporary pop-folk narrative painter and muralist. Her colorful and stylized artworks prompt contemplation about the beauty of nature, the sometimes humorous details of being human, and the challenges of coexisting with other lives on our planet.
Her inspirations are rooted in biological studies, dream imagery, ancestral mythologies, and folk/outsider arts. She paints primarily in acrylics on wood or mural fabric, sometimes adding three dimensional, collage and mixed media elements.
Largely self-taught in painting, Sarah studied illustration and animation at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts before relocating to LA. There she discovered the Venice studios of Roger Corman where she worked as a prop maker, animator, and set muralist. This began a lengthy career designing for film and theater productions, laying the foundation for her current multi-disciplinary art practice.
Her work has been featured in many publications including Synkroniciti Magazine, Unpsychology Magazine, iō Literary Journal, Art Muzeo Magazine and others. She has also exhibited in galleries across the US, including Ghost Gallery, Seattle; La Luz de Jesus Gallery, LA; Sylvia White Gallery, Agoura; Gabba Gallery, LA; the Ontario Museum of History and Art; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art; The Autry Museum; and Lancaster MOAH/Cedar.
Sarah travels between workspaces in Central New Jersey and the Santa Susana Mountains outside of Los Angeles. The cycles of nature, and the diverse people and habitats she encounters across the country provide endless inspirations for her artworks.
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Artist Statement
Every artwork starts with an idea. The ideas I’m most interested in visually developing are narratives about interconnections between humans and nature.
Our most pressing concern at present is climate change, which stems from pollution, which stems from lack of empathy. The underlying theme of my artworks is transformation, as actual metamorphosis and as a metaphor for the internal and external process of evolving how we see ourselves in relation to other people and living things on the planet.
My inspirations are rooted in biological studies, dream psychology, traditional mythologies, and folk/outsider arts. I paint with mixed acrylic media on wood or synthetic paper, connecting ancestral mark-making and cultural storytelling to the sensibilities and aesthetics of modern living. I call this style, “contemporary pop folk art.”
I am drawn to subjects that have both light and dark characteristics. Energetic, discordant colors and lines around central figures could represent destructive chaos, or ecstatic life-force. Both can be true. I make art to express the many feelings I have about being alive in this wonderful, terrifying, Anthropocene moment.
I paint poems
that haven’t been written yet.
Or maybe the poems do exist
in a place where
all the world’s creative thoughts go,
but only dreams can read them.