Sarah Stone is a North American artist whose works address life/death cycles and human relationships with nature. Her visual vocabulary is an amalgam of contemporary influences, ancestral memories and dreams.
Sarah grew up in a rural suburb in New Jersey where she spent much of her time reading (mythology and folklore) and studying the small animals inhabiting the woods around her home. After graduating with a degree in narrative illustration, she worked for a while at a small publishing house in NY before relocating to LA. There she discovered the Venice studios of Roger Corman where she was hired to create murals and props for the (soon-to-be) cult-classic space movie, Android. This was the start of a lengthy career designing props and sets for films, television shows and theater.
Sarah now works as a full-time artist in a canyon studio in the San Fernando Valley. This marginally developed rural area is known to firefighters as an “Urban Interface Zone” where recurring brush fires and the impacts of human activities are constant reminders of the fragility of nature. Drought also plays a role in the ebb and flow of life in the canyon. Cycles of destruction and recovery inform much of her work.
She has exhibited across the US, most recently (2021/22) in Ghost Gallery in Seattle, Sylvia White Gallery in Agoura, and Gabba Gallery in LA. She has also exhibited at the Ontario Museum of History and Art, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, The Autry Museum, and Lancaster MOAH/Cedar where she won the Mayor’s Award for best painting.
Her work has been featured in film productions (Doogie Kamealoha M.D., Yes Day, Atypical, Grown-ish & Criminal Minds, among others) and publications including Shout Out LA, Unpsychology Magazine, Pomona Valley Review and ioLiterary Journal.
I grew up in a house full of books, mostly aimed at adult readers. So, I drew pictures to accompany Poe, Stoker, the Brontës, e.e. cummings, Graham Greene, Homer, Anderson’s fairytales… you get the idea. Some of the books already had amazing art in them. Treasure Island, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, The Water Babies, illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith, and Wind in the Willows, illustrated by Ernest Shepard, were a few of the wonderfully illuminated books that gave me inspirations for my drawings. Then I discovered Underground Comix which totally shifted my perception of narrative art.
I moved to California where I met filmmakers who pulled me into the world of art and sets for movies. This is another form of describing stories but on a much larger scale. When I started my own art studio, I continued the process of conjuring imagery, first from world mythologies, then later from my own experiences and dreams. I must have been a griot in a former life because storytelling has always been my motivation to create.
Generational myths, folklore, epic poems and campfire tales, the vernacular of the telling, even the individual marks we use to visually express language, are a second skin that defines how each of us sees our place in the context of communities, environments, and our planet. Through art I explore our embedded stories, tracing their effects, and sometimes their possibilities.
~ Sarah Stone, 2022