Smoke, 12" x 12"

Oil on Wood Panel, 12 x 12 inches.

"My grandparents had an apple orchard in Naches Heights above the valley where I grew up in Eastern Washington. Every year after Thanksgiving dinner was done, the uncles would build a fire and all the cousins would gather around in the snow at night and tell stories or sled down the big hill onto the frozen pond.  So many years of holiday gatherings in this place in the past… they all run together in my mind season over season and individual events dissipate like smoke.  My grandparents passed away and my family no longer lives in the heights. The pond was filled in and the trees are gone and cattle now graze.  Wine is a thing now, where the apples once grew.  Abstractions of these past moments in the space remain with me. Fire, the land, smoke in the air, frozen water, liquid paint.

My 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."  

Sarah Dillon is originally from Yakima, WA, and now based in Lake Tapps, WA. She received her MFA in painting from Boston University in 2004. Noted exhibitions include Gallery XIV in Boston, which was featured in The Wall Street Journal, Artscope Magazine, MSNBC, Imagine Arts, and Boston Globe. Sarah has exhibited work at the Washington State Convention Center, Blackfish Gallery, Portland, OR, Gallery 110, Seattle, WA, Brooklyn Art Library, NY, Western Bridge Gallery, Seattle, WA, Oxbow Gallery, Northampton, MA, Untitled Space Gallery, NY, Center on Contemporary and Political Art, DC, and Cave Gallery, Vancouver, WA to name a few. Sarah has created commissioned work for the Pike Place Market Foundation and is included in private collections around the country.