April 1-13, 2013

Sarah Holland is an emerging artist visiting from her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. She graduated in 2011 from the University of Tennessee with a B.F.A. in Painting.

I met Sarah for coffee last week, and dropped in on her again later at A.I.R. Studio. This is Sarah’s first residency. She is hoping to immerse herself in a process of art making here that she can apply to her daily life back in Knoxville.

Sarah interprets her environment and experiences to produce large, colorful abstract paintings. Her work is process oriented, building with multiple layers and reacting to the surface over time to dictate the content. She uses photography as a source to inspire her work, and spent the first day of her residency exploring and photographing Paducah.  During her time in here, her focus is on creating new work. She expects that the local area will act as a source for her new paintings.

She would like to be compared to artists Cindy Sherman, Jessica Dickinson, and Mark Rothko; they avoid the obvious, and allow the viewer plenty of space interpret the work. She tells me that Jessica Dickinson makes four paintings a year. She admires her discipline and ability to let her work develop over a length of time.

Sarah is mixing paints when I drop by the studio. She works with a wide range of colors, but feels limited sometimes by her palette. The floor is covered with a variety of painting surfaces in different stages of progress and there are little picture frames scattered across the table at the back of the studio. She has been working on small paintings and collages to fill the frames to take a break from her larger works. I am impressed by her ambition and energy, and look forward to seeing what she has finished by the end of the week.

To see more of Sarah’s work, visit her website.