Happy Holidays and a Thank You...

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A thank you to everyone who has been reading my blog this year, sending email comments and/or posting comments!

I am in the middle of moving my studio, as well as painting and remodelling no less than 5 rooms in my house, so I am painting, but not what I consider to be the good kind of painting.  And, although I have three large drawings in progress, I am not actually able to set up the easel in my studio and draw for at least a few more weeks.  As always, I spend the little bits of available time on my Moleskine sketches, and I will be posting a few of those as they get finished over the next month.

The new studio space will be great - three large windows for natural light and 20 more square feet of floor space.  I am looking forward to getting settled in:

In the meantime, I would like to send out a wish for a happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year! 

-Sarah P.

BANG 5

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Well, here we are - it is that time of year again...
Wait, how did it get to be BANG 5???!!  It seems like only yesterday when I opened my big mouth at a 1978 board meeting and suggested that we should have a small works show at 1978 and then poof! there I was organizing said exhibit...
Each year it gets even better, with more art and more artists.  A lot of gallery views are on the facebook event page for BANG (you have to be logged on to facebook to see), but here are a couple of installation sneaky-preview pics:

 I will be showing my Strange Tales as well as giclees of my larger drawings.  Stop by, say hello, and enjoy the hot cider while strolling the gallery...

The Vigil

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The Vigil

Graphite pencil on Arches hot press watercolor paper

48 x 20 inches

A couple of details:

[Yes, I got the memo proclaiming that women who want to be taken seriously as artists should not use nesting or egg imagery in their artwork because it is too womanly and otherwise unacceptable as subject matter.  I tore that memo up and threw it into the trash can in my studio – the trash can that sits on top of my old copy of H.W. Janson’s "History of Art" – you know, one of the early editions with about 5 women artists mentioned in the span of 10,000 years of art history?  It makes a fabulous leaf press, by the way, which happens to be why it is under the trash can (extra weight to press those pretty fall leaves even flatter)].
Alas, speaking of art history, the early representations of gorgons were very ugly creatures that were used as protective guardians over sacred spaces (temples and the like). 

Artist renderings of gorgons gradually evolved into more beautiful creatures, but their expressions became fiercer.  I am quite fond of both the Bernini and the Caravaggio Medusas: 

 

So, there is some liberty taken with my representation of the mythological gorgon - let's say its a reclamation of a mythical gorgon – for this is a protective, maternal being lost in its own reverie; the ferocity lies dormant, but ever-present, beneath the surface.