Sally is a painter born and raised in West Sussex, and its landscapes and seasons have always held an important place in her imagination. From childhood she has spent hours each week walking in and drawing the landscapes of Sussex.
Sally’s recent landscape paintings of the Sussex countryside move between representation and abstraction. She uses a mixture of sketchbook drawings and paintings, photographs and imaginative reflections on the experience of being outside in the landscape to create them. They are painted in acrylics, along with inks, neocolour crayons and sometimes gold leaf. She builds them up in layers, using techniques such as sanding, wiping off and scraping back the paint to allow previous layers to show through.
Many of the paintings are created with a variety of different tools – brushes, palette knives, sticks, fingers – and techniques – flicking, sgraffito, stenciling and printing with paint. Sally aims to capture not only the shapes and colours of the landscapes and seasons but also something of the sensations, emotions and memories associated with particular places and times.
Sally particularly enjoys returning to familiar places – Rackham, Waltham Brooks, Pulborough Brooks, Chantry Hill – at different times of year and in different light levels or weather conditions. Drawing and painting places across time is something she finds particularly interesting and rewarding. Just as the paintings are made up from different layers of paint , so the experiences of each place are layered over time.
She also creates installations of small works in different settings – a current example being on display at Bepton Church.
Sally has painted since childhood, and throughout her adult life. In 2019 she graduated with a 1st Class Hons degree in Painting from the University for the Creative Arts having followed their distance learning programme.
