Land
E scape
Sarah Stolar (USA)
An artist’s statement My drawings are a record of emotive internal events. They are a map to navigate my internal psyche and a witness to my subconscious. These landscapes, while familiar in composition, feel uncharted, dreamlike, and ethereal, evoking a visceral experience of exposing an inner truth. The division between the realm of memory and reality is explored through the dynamics of the landscape; there is a physical world around us, and there is also the internal perspective. The low horizon line acts as a grounding element, both literally and metaphysically, connecting the earth’s reality and the imagined celestial sphere. Images borrowed from school-girl notebook doodles, fairytales, and religious stories are engulfed in turbulence, recalling storms, explosions, tornados, and other energetic surges. Ultimately, these representational images function as autobiographical metaphors, yet allow for the viewer to establish their own interpretation based on their life story and connection to the symbolism. The drawings stem from intense personal experiences, often dark and heavy-hearted, in a cathartic effort to make melancholia beautiful. I work with a variety of materials including pastels, water soluble crayons, inks, pencils, charcoal, and anything else that will make a mark. My drawing process is tactile, messy, intuitive, and exploratory. I honor the true nature of each medium, allowing myself to lose control of it, like when ink drips or charcoal smears. Each drawing is a journey of creation, destruction, and restoration. This physical act of reworking, redrawing, sanding out, and painting over satisfies my need to drop into a flow state, surrendering myself to the materials, and allowing chance to dictate the outcome of the drawing. This layering, covering, and revealing illuminates the intangible and grasps on to fleeting thoughts, emotions, and stories that are often unexplainable. The process also speaks to the overall human desire to hide from the uncomfortable and “fix” what is not working. The act of drawing in this manner enables my complex psychological concepts to be transformed into a record of momentary scenarios. The
Book of Drawings, handmade book with Stonehenge paper, collage, and various, 2014; photo by Jeff Medinas accumulation of the work is a diary of mark-making, a sketchbook unbound. The drawings are a doorway into my creative self, an act of meditation and revelation. Sarah Stolar is an interdisciplinary artist who lives in the Bay Area. Her primary focus is drawing and painting, however she also works in multi-media installation, film, and video. She grew up in an art
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