Sarah Boyle’s eerie landscape paintings make us feel as if we’ve been beamed to a foreign planet - naggingly familiar and yet… kind of like the past 2.5 years.
Alone but not lonesome - I’d describe these as more wistful, seeing beauty in a landscape that is under duress.
-Emily Rapport, Artist and Director at Eat Paint Studio + Gallery, Chicago, IL, Jan. 2022
In August of 2020, I was in Rocky Mountain National Park during the Cameron Peak Fire. The air, sky, and sun grimly showed signs of the wildfire without seeing its presence. Though it was beautiful and otherworldly, it transformed a landscape with which I was extremely familiar into something eerie, ominous and reflective of the time. Driving up 12,000 feet along Trail Ridge Road, my mind began to slip in and out of seeing reality into a world of feeling and symbol. Going back to the studio, my references never seemed quite right, especially when describing the red hot sun and remembering how it moved above the tree line and hovered over crowds of people like an entity swathed in veils of tangerine smoke.
I’m drawn to landscape and place because of the transformative way it can reveal inner life. Translating the experience and memory of a place through paint allows for pleasant divergent ways of describing the essence of a thing versus depicting its formal qualities. I have spent October of last year until now in the studio with this place, getting further and further from my photo references and focusing more on the elements of the mountainscape that hypnotized me, forced me inward, and have continued to change slightly with each recall.