Sarah is a Yorkshire landscape artist, living and working in Ramsgill, a rural village in Upper Nidderdale. She graduated from the University of Northumbria in 1994 with a B.A. hons degree in graphic design.
I’ve known Nidderdale all my life, visiting family in Ramsgill, where I took my first steps! So when I had the chance to renovate a barn and build my studio here in 2007 it felt like ‘coming home’.Wherever possible I collect reference in sketchbooks and take photos. The ideas are developed back in the studio, where I usually start by mixing a palette of colour, combining oil paint with a traditional medium marble dust. This changes the paint from a buttery consistence to a thicker paint more like butter cream, which lends itself to impasto and sgraffito techniques. I paint a base colour which tends to be dark red, and then start applying paint in layers with spatulas and palette knives, scraping back and re applying until the required result is achieved. I don’t use brushes at all. The detail is added by scraping back through the wet paint to reveal the under colour. I use a variety of implements including graphite pencils, Koh-I-Noor graphite sticks, water soluble Art Graph (not unlike tailors chalk), R&F pigment sticks and Sennelier oil Sticks.