Sarah Dillon is an American artist based in Lake Tapps, WA. Her work explores memory and change through imagery and the physical act of painting. The surface aggressively develops, pulling at threads of setting, figure and narrative gleaned from family photographs. It ages. The painted surface is aggressively worked in layers of added color only to be scraped away to abstractly reveal painting action from below, obliterating what was present. Fresh mark-making, born anew. We interviewed Sarah to learn more about her practice, inspirations, and what she is working on today.
1. How does your creative day look like and what inspires you to make art?
As a mom to two young daughters and tenured art faculty at Green River College, studio time is a precious commodity. I’m incredibly grateful and lucky to have a family that understands the importance of this time and helps me to create the space for working that I need in order to maintain and grow my practice. Just today, I was talking to our students in class about the need to establish a space of belonging and a network of support in order to be successful. All artists need that. Alone in the studio, it can often feel very solitary, but the reality of time and sacrifice and support by others to make that creative time possible is real. Even now, as I consider this question, sitting in my studio, my husband is driving our kiddos to dance practice and the grocery store, and making a plan for dinner, knowing I need some contemplative time to work tonight. He offered. I didn’t ask. It is a delicate balance and one I do not take for granted. Parenthood has changed my studio practice, but it was a pivot, not an end. It took a few years to get a rhythm down, but I am pretty proud of being a professional artist and a mom. Because yes, you can be successful at both.
I speak with my students a lot about balance and time and dedication, frustration, exhaustion and persistence and the “why” factor. Why we do what we do and why it is important. I don’t have a reason why other than it is a part of who I am, and long periods outside of creative spaces are generally not good for my psyche. I guess I am also lucky to have a full-time job where I get to work in creative spaces all the time, even when not at home in my own studio.
Students are an inspiration! Finishing a piece creates such a substantial sense of completion that it is a driving force to continue making. The “ah-ha” moments working with students in my day can fuel those resolutions. My kids supply that sometimes, too, with their energy and off-the-wall ideas.
So, to describe an ideal studio day… That’s what we call them around here… It includes coffee and music. A good vibe is key. As a musician myself, I don’t think I’ve ever worked in my studio without music. It sets the tone. I have a sign on my door that says “Divine Frenzy in Progress.” Truly, that is what happens here, and it is hard to describe. Every moment is accounted for, and time is not wasted. I tend to have multiple projects going on at any given time. My brain is on fire, and I bounce from one to the next as an idea inspired by one sets a direction for others. I often work in series. Sometimes my husband dips his head in to quietly remind me to eat. Self-care. Otherwise, I will forget. I will be on my feet for as many hours as my studio allows, and then just sink into the couch at the end of the day, mind still racing. Either really satisfied or agitated, depending on how things went in there. Sometimes the divine frenzy is interrupted by life stuff. I’d like to take this moment to ensure my neighbors that, despite my frazzled, paint-covered, hair in a bandana appearance meeting my daughter at her school bus stop in front of our house yesterday, that I am not a pirate. For this, it is nice to have the studio at home.
2. Tell us more about your art studio. If someone walked into your space, what would they learn about you?
When I walk into my studio and turn on the lights, it is like I am switching on my creativity too, and things just flood in. I pick up where I left off. It took years to develop a relationship with my space like that, where the space itself has conditioned me, or the other way around, perhaps, to put on my artist hat when I enter. I am very protective of that relationship. I built this space from the ground up, and every square inch has an intentional purpose. I have another sign on the studio door for my kids: “This is a place for deep thinking and peace. Sass, negativity and squabbling with your sister are not allowed in the studio. Immediate ejection.” They know.
I had a studio downtown Seattle for 10 years in a building with other artists before our second daughter was born. It was a drive from our home in the suburbs, but awesome to be right in the middle of Pioneer Square and participate in the monthly artwalk and share a bottle of wine with colleagues during our figure drawing sessions on Monday nights. It was great for its moment, but as my eldest was growing and getting ready to start school, and our second was coming along, we realized we needed more space for our growing family. The commute downtown was going to take too much time for the studio to be sustainable. My husband and I bought a house in the country, closer to the college where I work, with enough property that we could build a studio at home. I worked with my colleagues in the carpentry program at the college to design and build a custom 500-square-foot space on the property. We broke ground in the winter of 2020.
My daughter was born in March of that year, right at the start of the pandemic. It ended up taking us a full year, with a skeleton carpentry class (reduced enrollment due to the pandemic), to complete the project, and my husband and I did a lot of the work ourselves. There were a lot of YouTube videos at 11 at night after the kids were in bed, trying to figure out what we needed to complete before the phases of inspection. So, a few years in now, this is my happy space. I have a well-lit room for painting with a 10' ceiling, an office space for research and grading student work, my books and a space for dusty projects. Though if I’m honest, the kids have pretty much moved into that side of the studio, which is generally now filled with Crayola tempera, beads, soap-making stuff or whatever crafty thing they are into at the moment. When we have friends over, the adults like to hang out in the painting side and look at the art, and the kids all hang out on the “kids” side and make art.
3. Do you prefer a minimalist or maximalist set-up and why?
I am an expressive artist with paint on the floor. Any space that I have to be clean and careful in makes me anxious and impacts the tension in my mark-making process. Messy space allowance is critical for successful art making. My house is clean, my studio is a mess. The walls are covered in sticky notes, dripped paint, thumbtacked images from a museum postcard, a few drawings and notes to myself about where I left off. There is always order in the chaos.
4. How did you get interested in your medium?
My Grandmother on my mom’s side was an art docent at Seattle Art Museum. My mother’s family values higher education, liberal arts and engagement in culture. My Grandfather on my father’s side was a farmer raising apples in Eastern Washington, worked with his hands and believed in a strong work ethic. These values were passed down to me and became a foundation of my own childhood.
I have always been encouraged to make things, think big thoughts and work hard. I was very lucky to have parents who supported my creative endeavours – both in their own individual ways, all through school. We were actively involved in the arts community growing up in Yakima. We regularly attended symphony concerts, cultural events, exhibition openings and interacted with artists. My mother was a nurse practitioner, and my father was a police officer. Cultural values feed directly into community service. This is who we are as a community, and it is important which is why I teach at a community college now. I have been making art my whole life, and it was always what I wanted to do when I grew up. I would not say there is a specific medium involved in that journey – painting sort of stood out and found itself along the way. I call myself a painter, but I work with all drawing materials, mixed media, assemblage and printmaking as well.
5. Describe your style in one sentence.
I am an expressive, sometimes frantic, intuitive, complex figure painter and storyteller. I am sentimental and pay attention to things. I don’t like following rules. See? That was more than one sentence.
6. Has your style changed over time?
Yes, it really has. It is hard to put a finger on that. As the years go by, the material has become looser, layered and more gestural than when I was in graduate school 20 years ago. My use of color has changed as well. I think back then, I was more focused on the narrative storytelling aspect of my work. Now, for whatever reason, it feels deeper, earthier, guttural even, and abstracted. Moodier. I think maybe I am tapping into something human that comes with age and parenthood, and longevity. I have better control of the desired mood I am attempting to set, or maybe I understand it better. Time and change have always been a part of my work, but I think it means something different to me in my late 40s than it did when I was in my early 20s.
I reflect on the seasons differently, the change in light. It is hard to describe, but I think becoming a parent had something to do with all of this as well. Time feels different. It passes much more quickly than it did when I was young. Youthful experiences repeat in the lives of my own children, and I revisit some of that in my work. The stories feel less concrete, perhaps, because they feel less my own and more shared with the human experience. I think that is part of the reasons why they shift in and out of abstraction.
7. What are your main artistic tools?
I am quite aggressive with the painting surface. I hate working on a plain, white surface. It shuts me down. Too clean, too perfect, and the minute I put a mark on it, the pristine surface is ruined. Hard to start anything that way, so all of my panels are first stained with a layer of thin red acrylic. From there, I paint abstractly and just enjoy the process, building up the surface typically with saturated oil colors. This layer is intended to be later painted over as the subject develops, and finally scraped back in places to reveal the underpainting layers that cut through the top surface. It allows me to go tighter with the imagery and then obliterate it to maintain the obscurity of the figure and the abstraction from painting action in the lower layers. I sand back into the surfaces and cut deep to expose those under layers. They feed into the surface and make for beautiful texture variation. Once completed, I glaze, which allows the light to travel through those layers more effectively and create luminosity.
8. Do you experience creativity blocks, and how do you stay positive and inspired? What elements in your studio inspire creativity?
Yes. I have learned over the years how to address these moments in my work. First, working in series allows me to bounce off the troubled spots and work on something that might be further along in its development. Sometimes, re-arranging the placement of where I have been working in the studio can freshen up my thinking.
The sketchbook is a great source to return to in these moments as well. It is full of quotes, ideas, song lyrics, compositional studies, pattern swatches and photographs that are collected as I move along in my practice, and a great place to return to when I can’t think of what is next. I have pages and pages of painting title ideas in there too.
Another thing I do is write about and reflect on what I have already made. Sometimes that helps create a dialogue with work already completed. Drawing from that can help. I will take a moment to look at the work of other artists. If time, going to the museum has always been a good idea. As my subject matter is often derived from family photos, sometimes just looking back on the family photo albums can jar a direction too. If I am just tired and can’t push past the moment, then studio grunt work always needs to be done. Cleaning out the studio, prepping painting panels, setting myself up for success. It can help pull me out of a negative mindset if the next time I walk in, the studio is inviting.
9. What artists – either contemporary or from history – have had an impact on you and your art practice?
When I was working at Tacoma Art Museum right out of my undergraduate program, I had an opportunity to work with Nathan Oliveira. I remember his flight was late, and I was driving around the circle past the arrivals gate, watching for him in my old beat-up ’76 lemon yellow Honda Civic with a tie-dye blanket for a backseat. He was amused by this. He was also having a rough day. His dog had just died, and he did not feel up to giving his talk at the museum quite yet. We sat in the parking lot with 300 people waiting for him upstairs, talking for a good long while about art and teaching and community. He convinced me to go to graduate school for painting and helped me realize what I wanted to do with my career. I began applying for graduate programs at the end of that summer.
In addition to Oliveira’s work, I am also influenced by Squeak Carnwath, Susan Rothenberg, and my graduate Professor and world-renowned painter, John Walker, who always believed in my potential. I really like Dana Shutz’s work and how, in grad school, she painted boyfriends for all her single friends. Her work is a hoot. John Aleander, Gwen Knight, Max Beckmann… I have eclectic taste, though all of these artists have a loose, expressive figurative style of working with thicker paint while still maintaining a semblance of narrative or direct storytelling. I really enjoy that.
10. What project are you working on right now? What would you like to do next?
I am really excited to start working large again! Aiming for some larger work to be done by next summer! Stay tuned!
