Landscape Artist, Sarah Carlson

ArtArtist

Dec 16

**Tell us a little bit about yourself and your art.**

Wondering and painting pretty much sums me up. I am a visual artist working across painting, sculpture and installation. My inspiration comes from time spent hiking, camping, climbing and paddling in wilderness spaces. I recently completed my Master of Fine Arts where I focused on creating interactive forest and cave installations in gallery spaces. Now I try to bring this dynamism and immersive energy into my textural, vibrant landscape paintings. Also, I am a new mama to a beautiful, energetic boy named Cedar. His fresh experience of the world around him fuels a lot of my thinking and creating these days.

What does your process look like when you are working on a painting?

I usually start outside on hiking trails, forest spaces and waterways where I will sketch en plein air alongside capturing photos. I then bring these small paintings and references into the studio where I seek to translate my experience of a particular space onto a larger canvas or panel. I love neon and pastel hues that contrast cooler green and blue landscape tones so my underpainting is often pinks, yellows or purples. Once this initial composition is blocked in I will begin layering on thick paint with palette knifes and brushes.

How does vulnerability impact your art? What does vulnerability mean to you?

My art practice is rooted in experiences in the great outdoors that push me beyond comfort and security. With this precocity and sense of smallness experienced from a canoe or on a cliff face, comes an increased dependence on and an awareness of the surrounding plants, soils and living creatures. I am fascinated by how vulnerability sensitizes people to the ways we are already interconnected with our environments. My current painting explorations are about compositionally enmeshing human forms within landscapes – pictorially playing with porous forms.

What do you enjoy most about being an artist?

Play. I get to play with and respond to various materials, colors, textures and so on. I explore relationships between ideas and forms in finding different ways of visually communicating. I consider it a great privilege, a wonderful responsibility and a ton of fun to create.