Q & A with artist Sara Edwards

Sara, Which artists inspire your work?

Pierre Bonnard, Clifford Still, Joan Mitchell, Basquiat, Rothko, Kathe Kollwitz.

What do you keep returning to?

Quite literally, I repeatedly paint cityscapes, surfboards, women’s bodies, graves, birds. Metaphorically, I’m repeatedly describing things that refuse to stay fixed:

• memories that shift

• symbols that evolve

• ghosts that linger

• wounds that remain active

• identities formed across cultures

• women’s bodies as sites of meaning

• graffiti as resistance to permanence

• mythology and dreams as unstable realities

What emotional questions do you explore?

What is the nature of grief? How do we experience freedom? How do experiences that cannot be fully represented continue to live in the present? How do invisible histories leave visible traces? What forms do ghosts take after conflict ends?

Tell us about your color palettes, composition and brushwork.

I use a palette knife in oil to create thick, heavy canvases. I love blues, lavenders, reds, yellow ochre and white. I think of my compositions as objects in relation to one another suspended in pure color, sometimes with pathways like a line of birds (abstracted into marks) across the canvas.