My Story

BIO

Sarah Stone started her art career with a production gig in a tiny graphic arts company located at Greene and Broome in Soho. Following up on a job offer to create art for an animated feature film, Sarah moved to LA where she discovered the indie film business, an outlaw art-making environment where all kinds of creative ideas were welcome. She began creating murals and props for commercials and rock videos (Supertramp, Duran Duran), set installations for low budget sci-fi movies (Android, Space Raiders) and eventually art directing/set decorating feature films, TV “MOW”s and network series’ including 52 Pick Up, The Wonder Years and Freaks and Geeks. She continued working on numerous films and television shows for the next two decades.

Sarah’s artworks are personal visual narratives developed from fairy tales, folklore and ordinary acts of living, drawn down into the land of dreams where an intuitive symbolic language emerges that is both contemporary and ancient. Her colorful oil paintings connect ideas across time, cultures and environments.

Her art has been presented by galleries and museums around the United States including the 2019 LA Art Show, The Autry Museum, Launch LA, South Bay Contemporary, Tangent Gallery, MI; Krikawa Gallery, AZ; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Ontario Museum of Art and History, LA Municipal Art Gallery, LA Artcore and Memorial Union Gallery, ND. Her work has also been featured in many publications including LA Weekly, The Heroine’s Journey, Art Muzeo Magazine, Pomona Valley Review, Man of the World, Diversions LA, and Naming Ceremony Magazine.

About

In my 20s I lived in a city and was busy with city things, only noticing the passage of time as weekends transitioning into weeks and back into weekends. When I moved to the rural edge of Los Angeles I began to tap into the rhythms of nature, watching animals migrate, plants grow and habitats evolve. I also had two children who brought another level of awareness with new stages of development every day, and new things to learn.

In addition to beauty and growth there was also death. I have lost many friends: AIDS, heroin, car accidents, heart attacks, infections, suicide, cancer…all have taken their toll. I too have skimmed past death 3 or 4 times. I look back on those moments with utter astonishment that I’m still here. Life is resilient, sometimes it’s insanely lucky, but it’s also so fragile, a porcelain tea cup that we all share.

When they were little my kids asked me a lot of questions about life, and death. “Where do we come from? Why are we here? Why do we die? Where do we go afterwards?” I was raising little baby Sartre and Nietzsche.

I went to sleep with these questions on my mind, hoping to distill them into one sound, one idea, and woke with the phrase, “Fragility of Being.” Being in the world seems so solid, but it’s so ephemeral. I want people to feel that, and not take being here, and the other living things that share “now” with us, for granted. This is what moves me every day to make art: I create visual stories, dreams and parables that reflect our shared ride – intensely fragile, yet sometimes magical and durable – in this crazy teacup.

My studio sits in a rustic and historic canyon at the western edge of LA county where I am visited daily by coyotes, owls and hummingbirds. I paint in oils on wood, creating allegorical narratives about humans, nature and primal energies. Using inspirations gleaned from dreamwork, ancestral lore and folk magic, I draw invisible lines from past to present, person to person, and human to environment to convey cultural analogs and root connections.

Thank you for visiting. Contact me here.