Sarah Gillespie
Sarah Gillespie, Artist
Blackawton artist Sarah Gillespie can often be spotted, notebook in hand, in the countryside or by the water’s edge at Slapton.
This full time artist is a meticulous observer of the subtle effects of light on the landscape, capturing the grandeur of the natural world.
Sarah’s work is absorbing. She said: “Each piece takes a long time to make - so much time that in recent years I’ve only been able to sustain the necessary patience by seeing them as ‘offerings’ and the activity of painting itself as devotional.
“My work is about paying attention to the natural world in which we live. Staying still and paying attention. Unfashionable as it may seem, I am not concerned with self expression, in fact I think we are at our most creatively powerful when we can overcome or more precisely forget ourselves, staying open and attentive to the way things are.”
Sarah’s paintings and charcoal drawings are exhibited and collected internationally. Born in Farnham in Surrey, she trained at the Atelier Neo Medici in Paris and the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University. She was awarded the Egerton Coghill Prize for landscape painting, and the prestigious international Elizabeth Greenshield Award for figurative painting. Sarah is currently represented by Waterhouse & Dodd of Cork Street, London, and Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath.
In 2007, Sarah published a book of paintings and drawings of Slapton Ley, an area that continues to inspire her with its sparse beauty. In 2009 she published, with Sharpham House, View From The Boathouse Window, a book of her drawings with poems by the famous Liverpool poet Brian Patten, who now lives in Dittisham.
Sarah typically makes tiny oil sketches outside in the summer months, and then the very large studio canvases and charcoals in the winter. Her studio in Blackawton was built by her husband Paul, director and co-owner of Carpenter Oak Ltd, a small company based in Cornworthy who make beautiful timber-frame buildings. The couple have a son and a daughter.
Sarah has work in a three person show at the Coombe Gallery in Dartmouth at the end of May, and will be running an intensive drawing workshop on May 22nd and 23rd at the Flavel. Her next major solo show takes place in London in Autumn 2011.
