I am a painter. I went to art school at Tyler School of Art, studied painting, photography art history and drawing in Rome. I then got a Masters in Anthropology of Art and Visual Culture at the University of London. I was concerned with photography and also was fascinated by performance artists and the work of people like Marina Abromovic, and street artists. Then I left the arts and followed a journey that led me through teaching to anthropology and the study of identity. During this period I wrote prolifically, involved in the thick description of identity in a multicultural, changing, broken world using ethnography.

I returned to painting during the global Pandemic as I was healing from chronic fatigue syndrome. I work with oils on paper or raw canvas, using processes and techniques originated by the Abstract Expressionists and particularly the colorists Barnett Newton, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko. My subject matter is family which I abstract into familiar, ordinary symbols: birds, numbers, forms. I paint from the subconscious. My other subject matter is color and how it impacts the viewer.

I met a cartoonist named Ian once on a Zoom meeting. He drew a picture of me on a post it note and showed it to me on Zoom so I screenshot-ed it and now you are looking at it.

Sara is my 3rd name. Aidan and I also have a sister named Mary. You’ll learn more as you go. It’s only complicated because our parents were beautiful, broken people who did beautiful and broken things to us. You would think with an introduction like that that we don’t love them. But that’s the part that is endless grief, you see. We loved them more than anyone in the entire world.