Bright Shades 04

Influenced by Georgia O’Keeffe and the Dutch realist painters, Sarah Bird creates intimate worlds that occasionally tip into the surreal. With her latest exhibition, Bright Shades, Bird explores the idea of parental love-- its talismanic quality and real-world limitations. She examines how the human psyche reconciles feelings of security & vulnerability both as a parent and in relation to Mother Nature.

Inspired by traditional still-life and landscape genres, Bird’s oil paintings are personal and filled with everyday objects like rocks, shells, stickers even watermelon rinds. Though painted from life rather than from photos, the elements are never all together as they appear in the finished paintings. Flowers wilt and are replaced, dishes and stones move around, as if of their own volition. The paintings are collaged realities, each actively composed and edited over time, an ongoing improvisation in the way of abstract painting. Small touches of the surreal also call attention to the artifice of arrangement and, most importantly, assert the abiding importance of the imagination in how we frame the world. 

The recipient of a 2017 Idaho Arts Grant, her paintings have been shown in numerous group & solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Block Island, Rhode Island.