‘Shed Still Life with Johnston’s Railway Type' - by Sarah Desmarais - 2025

Sarah Desmarais trained as a painter at Central School of Art in London, before moving in the 1990s to rural Provence, where she focused on landscape painting, working en plein air in oil paint and watercolour. Over the next ten years her work became progressively more abstract and more studio based, springing from an internal world at once dreamlike and informed by the experience of immersion in landscape.

Sarah's current abstract, loosely geometric paintings reference an internal world of land/sky/seascapes conjured in daydreams and imagination. She continues to be inspired by walking and working by the sea in East Sussex, Cornwall and the Balearic Islands. She’s interested in experiences of awe, reverie and numinosity arising in nature, and is often inspired by poetry in seeking visual equivalents for these. She enjoys the tension between geometric forms and expressive, organic qualities of brush stroke and freehand drawing that potentially break up this order, mirroring her sense of nature as both unruly and underpinned by invisible structures. She loves to explore the interplay between the flat picture plane and the ambiguous and inviting kind of pictorial space described by Ben Nicholson (Horizon, 1941) as ‘an imaginative world in which one could live’.

Sarah works in a variety of media including oil paint, collage and gouache. Her compositions are developed slowly in the studio from a number of different starting points, including working in gouache on paper within a grid, and using collage to generate novel arrangements of forms. She loves the role of play, serendipity, mess and happenstance in the process, considering the materials she uses as very active participants in the creative process. She works on many pieces at a time, building up layers in paper or oils, and waiting for each painting to tell her the next move or to declare itself finished.

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