The Artist

The granddaughter of a rodeo rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Sarah grew up in a small NJ suburb wishing to run away and join a roving carnival herself. Moving to LA with nothing but a bus pass and an armload of art, she found her opportunity at the funky Venice film studio of Roger Corman. Joining the art department of his latest low budget space adventure, she entered the madcap arena of the entertainment world where she worked for many years designing and fabricating props and sets for films, television shows and even an iconoclastic puppet theater production.

Like set design, Sarah’s artworks are a form of visual storytelling through which she creates imaginative symbolic narratives about people, nature and being. She describes her creative process as following an intuitive current, which describes a Taoist principle of going where things organically lead rather than trying to force solutions. Through this action of inaction, compositions emerge like seedlings seeking light.

She has exhibited her artworks around California (with forays into Detroit, Ashville, NC and Albuquerque, NM) most recently appearing 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 also been featured in film productions (Yes Day, Atypical, Grown-ish & Criminal Minds, among others) and publications including Unpsychology Magazine, Pomona Valley Review, The Book of Sighs and Art Muzeo Magazine.

Sarah studied children’s book illustration and (cel) film animation at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, but is a self-taught painter. She now lives and works in a canyon studio at the southern edge of Ventura county. Nature, humanity, and the impermanence of being create the through line for much of her work. Her paintings and mixed-media artworks use color as subject, connecting realism with her own subconscious symbology to create dream-like scenarios which provoke questions about relationships and the spaces between now and next.

The Fragility of Now

I live and work in an area known to fire crews as a Wildlife Urban Interface. In this ragged borderland I watch nature persistently bend itself around the human advance like a tree’s bark growing around a nail. Acts of defiance and submission are evident in every observation. Fires ravage, but green shoots return through the ash. Frogs retreat, but lizards and rabbits flourish, attracting owls, bobcats and coyotes.

Life is resilient, sometimes it’s insanely lucky, but it’s also so delicate, a porcelain tea cup we all share. My paintings are colorful visual stories that reflect our shared ride – tangled and fragile, yet often magical and durable – sailing along in this crazy, beautiful, perilous teacup.

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