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| Sarah Tolliver |
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Artist's Statement:
According to the conventional wisdom of the Art World, I am a dilettante, an amateur, the merest dabbler, capriciously flitting from one style to another, never fully developing an idea into a single large body of work. I utterly reject these labels.
Every painting I do, regardless of medium or style, is about the shapes of people, or the shapes of things. I am interested in capturing the truth of a moment; how something or someone looked in a particular instant of time. The curve of a hip, the kink in a dog’s paw, the coincidence of line - these things fascinate me. Through experiments with composition and color, I try to figure out why something has to be placed a certain way in order to be right. My work is about exploring the minimum of information necessary to convey a certain idea.
Artificial imposition of artistic constructs hamper the expression of what I see and feel about a given subject, which is why my paintings are so stylistically varied. Often I do paint several pieces that are similar in style, until I feel I’ve solved a particular problem, or fully explored an idea. However, the idea of setting out purposefully to plan and execute fifteen or twenty paintings with a particular style and theme in mind just to satisfy the conventions of the insider “art crowd” leaves me cold.
OK, all of that being said, sometimes a painting is just a painting. I like it when I’m working in the studio, I’m playing good music really loud, my mood is upbeat and driven, and something that just looks really cool comes out on the canvas. Admitting this, and advertising it in this way, marks me as the worst of the worst in the Art World….yes, a dilettante, an amateur, and mere dabbler. So be it.
Artist's Biographical Information:
I was born in St. Louis and we moved to California in the early 1970's. I grew up in Palm Springs, went to boarding school in Pasadena, attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and College of the Desert in Palm Desert. I worked through most of my twenties in retail bookstore management, with a brief stint in my parents' advertising agency. I joined the Navy at age 26 on a whim and was stationed in Spain, where I met my husband, Randy. We were transferred to Patuxent River, Maryland, where I got out of the Navy and worked for a government contractor, and then we moved to historic Port Norfolk, Virginia. I did a lot of the work renovating that house while Randy was out to sea. We moved to Spain again for three more years, and we've been back here in the States for almost four years. I am busy again renovating our 1903 Queen Anne style house in Halethorpe. I have two stepsons, Jonathan (24) and Patrick (22), two beagles and two tabby cats..
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