BRIGHT SHADES | Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird’s summer show Bright Shades is a collection of oil paintings referring to a type of haunting of the bright, a sense of the yin-yang nature of things. Bird draws on nineteenth-century techniques and seventeenth-century imaginative Flemish perspectives to weave still-life and landscape into intimate tabletop worlds that occasionally tip into the surreal. 

“My process is a lot like collage,” says Bird. “I paint without much planning and let my instincts guide my decisions. It’s not always efficient. Often, objects that I spent a lot of time on are edited out of the work and buried under the paint.” She adds, “Living in the West has informed much of my work. My first desire was to be a landscape painter, and I think that although I rarely paint outside now, I’m still driven by that elusive idea of a ‘sense of place.’”

 Influenced by Georgia O’Keeffe and the Dutch realist painters, Bird absorbed early on that close observation of nature was a core value for her, while also imbuing realism with a type of spiritual or imaginative concern. 

“Painting is about the human mind and what our attention reveals about our character and our values,” she says. “I like a painting that doesn’t stay in the bounds of realism like Morris Graves, Gertrude Abercrombie, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and the exquisite painting and strange configurations that come from old masters like Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, and Francisco de Zurbaran.”

The Opening Night reception with the artist will be on August 8th from 5:00-7:30pm at the gallery.