Bio

Sarah Stone is an artist and curator living in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited most recently at The Autry Museum, Ontario Museum of Art, MOAH Cedar and Launch Gallery. Sarah received her BFA from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

Following an offer to create art for an animated feature film, Sarah made the jump to LA where she found her new creative home in the indie film industry designing murals and props for commercials and rock videos (Supertramp, Duran Duran), set installations for sci-fi movies (Android, Space Raiders) eventually graduating to art directing/set decorating (IATSE) feature films, TV “MOW”s and network series’ including 52 Pick Up, The Wonder Years and Freaks and Geeks. She continued designing for numerous films and television shows for the next two decades.

Sarah’s studio artworks are personal visual narratives developed from traditional oral histories, folklore and ordinary experiences 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 invite viewers to find relatable emotional connections between themselves and others, despite cultural and environmental differences.

Her art has been presented by galleries and museums around the United States including those named above, as well as South Bay Contemporary, Tangent Gallery, MI; Krikawa Gallery, AZ; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, LA Municipal Art Gallery, LA Artcore and Memorial Union Gallery, ND. Her artworks are in private collections throughout the US, and have been featured in many publications including Unpsychology Magazine, LA Weekly, Art Muzeo Magazine, Pomona Valley Review, Man of the World, Diversions LA, and Naming Ceremony Magazine.

About

When I was living in cities I was immersed in the buzz and mechanics of urban life. Later, I moved to the rural edge of Los Angeles, an interstitial place where the remnants of city meet the beginnings of wild lands. In this space between there is much less noise. I started noticing the signals of nature, watching animals migrate, plants grow, and habitats evolve. I also had two young children who brought their own fresh awareness and ever-shifting perceptions.

Opening up to the life-rhythm of nature includes acknowledging the presence of death. In nature death is not a coda, it is the end of one cycle, followed by a pause, which enables another cycle to form and begin.

There is a Tibetan expression, Bardo, that refers to the space, or journey, between physical death and rebirth. But it can also describe the spaces that open up between one reality and the next. In those plateaus, or deserts, accepted paradigms vanish and we have no knowledge of, or control over, what will come next. Like a forest that has burned to the ground the emptiness may seem barren, but it is also a window into something new. In my paintings I explore the inchoate spaces between here and after, was and will be, endings and beginnings.

Using symbols and subjects gleaned from dreamwork, ancestral lore and folk magic, I employ an intuitive visual language that I hope is relatable to an audience beyond myself.

Thank you for visiting. Contact me here.