Finding Growth In Discomfort: Advice For Leveling Up Your Art Career With Sarah E. Boyle

In this inspiring discussion, Chicago-based artist Sarah E. Boyle shares valuable lessons she’s learned while growing her art career. Here’s what we discuss:

1. The ways in which Sarah has grown her art career over the last few years, and why mindset work has been essential for both her personal and professional growth.

2. How to strengthen your self-confidence as an artist.

3. The power of investing in yourself as you take your art career to the next level.

About Sarah -

Sarah E. Boyle is a Chicago-based painter who studied fashion, theatrical design, and illustration at Syracuse University and Ringling School of Art and Design before earning her BFA in Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Boyle uses oil on canvas and panel to convey place formally through landscape and introspectively through location, symbol, void and scale. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artnet News, My Modern Met, Office Space, Create! Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, Vanity Fair UK, The Third Coast Review, and New Visionary Magazine. She has shown at galleries and spaces in Tribeca, NYC, Chicago, IL, Indianapolis and Carmel, IN. Boyle has been a resident of the Cornelia Arts Building (Chicago, IL) since 2015 and a directory artist with Visionary Art Collective since 2020.

Website: saraheboyle.com

Instagram:@saraheboyle_painting

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Marshall Brown at Western Exhibitions

I have always been drawn to tiny peepholes into private worlds and architectural spaces where I can cast a fantasy of lives that inhabit the structural planes forming an interior. Recently I visited Western Exhibitions in Chicago and saw the work of Marshall Brown’s Chimera series, photomontages of intricately woven buildings forming an aesthetic of places that is entirely believable in their play on reality.

 

In my own practice, I would take to the streets at night and seek that perfect view into a night window. The darkness helped flatten my own perception of depth and relation to that interior, as well as concentrate my view on a miniature illumination and details found within.  The act of voyeurism was a thrill, and being removed spatially from the location left a chilling sense of something artificial, like a doll’s house constructed to play out an anticipated narrative. I was attracted to the color of walls, how shadows fell, a tiny chandelier, an elegant staircase leading to unknown space within the depth, and a memory or emotion shrinking me inside.

 

Both looking at Marshall’s 11 x 17 collages and collecting night windows created a stillness and slow observation of piecing together place. His works are an intuitive sampling, just as one imagines parts of their dream world fusing into the perfect complimentary whole. Additionally the titles seems to signify a date. I learned they were created between January 1 through December 31, 2014, similar in how I would make a night window once a day and repeat the practice over an extended period of time.

 

What is enticing about these works is their ability to form a realistic dimension of fragmented planes. The sampled photos come together so easily that I could forget how meticulously he formed the linear tempo throughout one image. One can convincingly see that world beyond as real and own their view in, just as if I can glance around the curtain, drawn by a light from within.

 

To find out more about Marshall Brown’s work visit here and to get details on Chimera visit here. 

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Catwalk, 2012,12 x 16.5 inches, pencil on paper.

There is a line, even if unmarked, between natural and unnatural, between built and un-built, between world and earth; and I revel where this line erupts.

Lava turns to stone that lines a Chicago garden.

 

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