Western Daily Press
Picture of The Week - Going
Home - Signed limited edition print, mounted and framed, £175.
The artist: Sarah Sweet The gallery: The Frame Station,
Weston-super-Mare
The Painting
INSPIRED by cattle seen at the improbably-named Velvet
Bottom, near Charterhouse in the Mendips, Going Home
is one of the most figurative of Sarah Sweet's works.
She is better known for her sweeping and more abstract
Bristol Channel seascapes, but this painting (of which
we can show just a portion above) shares with them
her enthusiasm for back-lighting provided by sunsets.
We have fantastic sunsets around here, the best in
the West Country," she says. "I have just
come back from Cornwall and love working there, but
the sunsets don't compare with what you see at Weston
or Clevedon!"
She says the Velvet Bottom cows struck a chord with
her with their tired, slow plod as they returned to
the farm for milking after a long day in the field: "I
don't know why, but they really got to me."
They inspired her to a greater degree of realism than
her usual explorations of colour and form and she has
carried it off with great feeling.
The Artist
SARAH Sweet is 35 and has been a professional artist for the
past two years. From Bristol, with her parents now living
in Nailsea, she studied art at Weston College and Winchester
School of Art, where she graduated in 1996 in printed textile
design.
The wheel is beginning to turn full circle for her
in that after returning to painting, she is now experimenting
with images printed on silk.
"I think they lend themselves to it and the end
result is that they appear actually to be painted on
the material," she says.
Her inspirations are the abstract masters Patrick
Heron and Howard Hodgkin and predominantly, the leading
British watercolour landscape painter, Kurt Jackson.
She admires him for his virtuosity and intense use
of colour, but she also relates to his close identification
with the Cornish landscape, his knowledge of it and
his emotional evocation of it in paint.
Committed to the West Country, she plans next to explore
the landscape of Glastonbury and the Tor, then work
from her Cornish sketchbook.
She is determined to make a long-term living out of
art and is constantly exploring new projects and outlets
for her work and producing fresh images for Sky Blue
Digital of clevedon, the printmakers where she finds
Rolf Harris an unlikely stablemate.
Along with John Butler, she is one of two artists
to have a studio above the Frame Station; in fact,
she first met the owner, Chris Cureton, when she took
some of her originals to be framed at his smaller outlet
near the Playhouse Theatre a few years ago.
"These look great," he said, able to go
beyond encouraging words by providing her with a place
to work.
The Gallery
FOR emerging West Country artists, exciting things
are happening this month at the Frame Station in
Walliscote Road, Weston-super-Mare (01934 628695).
Apart from housing two artists' studios, it has two
gallery rooms - from September increasing to five.
Sarah Sweet's work can be seen in the current exhibition
but the launch exhibition will showcase five other
artists - Jane Butler, Lynne Castell, Dee Howley Gibbs,
Vali James and Alison Procter.
Proprietor Chris Cureton still sees framing as the
cornerstone of his business and his shop has a fine
range of art greetings cards. He speaks with the enthusiasm
of a true art lover about his plans for the gallery.
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