NYAB Event - Sara MacCulloch “Landscapes”

Sara MacCulloch “Landscapes”

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

This event has ended.

The landscape has been a source of inspiration for Sara MacCulloch since childhood, when she spent summers and weekends in rural Nova Scotia exploring fields and shorelines. As a painter, her interest lies in exploring the connection between being in a landscape and looking at a painting of a landscape. In her newest body of work, she conveys not just the physical appearance of these places, but the emotional relationship she has built with them over the years.

This series was painted over the last year and is exclusively depictions of Halifax, Nova Scotia and the surrounding areas of the Minas Basin. She spends summers hiking and documenting the landscape with watercolor sketches and photographs. The rest of the year she expands these into larger oil paintings on canvas. Using broad, smooth brushstrokes, MacCulloch creates an inviting lushness out of earthy browns, cool blues, greens and greys.

MacCulloch begins her process with the feeling she wants to convey and allows herself to get lost in process of revealing it. Each work in this series was painted almost entirely in one sitting in order to focus on the most important elements of place and mood. The instant a painting is over-worked or does not come together in a day, MacCulloch scrapes it away to start anew, ensuring a sense of immediacy in her finished work. The results are gestural, yet resolved compositions that give us just enough information to understand the beauty of the place and emphasize being present in a fleeting moment. They are serene, subtle and still direct and honest.