Sarah Neale’s paintings are an extension of the senses. Inspired by nature, and influenced by dance music and memory, her work draws upon the world around her and her own movement simultaneously.
In this series, Neale takes nature as her theme. Her colourful, scratchy landscapes of Hampstead Heath glow from their wooden panels. In these works, we see ‘woodland walks’ of splattered orange and brown oil paint, dotted with aqua blue petalled sunflowers and bluebells, heads down. Pink, yellow and white floral displays emerge through gestural brushstrokes of thick oil paint, their edges defined in dusty black charcoal lines.
Guided almost effortlessly by a punchy soundtrack, her paintings form spontaneously, taking the shape of free-fall abstractions of line and rhythm. Layers of urban graffiti marks, spray-paint drips, and intense, furious graphite scribblings cover the canvas. Onto this flurry of energetic mark-making, Sarah then smears oil paint onto the canvas, enabling the vivid images to emerge. Gestural swathes of colour evoke a fiery sense of passion, whilst the splashes and dancing pencil-marks pierce delicately into the bright hues of sap greens and peppermint skies.
Beneath the dense layers of ‘landscape’ we are able to catch glimpses of neon-pink spray paint and dribbles of black, drawing attention to a wild, urban, gritty beauty, bubbling under the surface.
The Artist
Sarah Neale studied Fine Art at Camberwell, University of the Arts London and subsequently completed a PGCE at the IOE, University College London.
Sarah’s artistic process is inherently expressive, due to her dynamic ‘hands-on’ / physical approach. She notes, ‘The abstract force in my work comes from my love of colour and my love of the materials. Grabbing a vibrant teal straight from the palette and chucking it across the surface of a canvas with my fingers is a total joy for me. A flicker of a memory teamed up with the plasticity of the paint, its smell... takes my painting in whole new direction.’ Sarah lives and works in London.
Follow Sarah Neale on instagram: @sarahneale.art