In the Rhodies, 18" x 18"

Oil on Wood Panel, 18 x 18 inches.

"One of the things I have come to love about oil paint is the viscosity and malleability of the medium. How much the pigment and thus the mood can change with the right additive, and how it changes from a liquid glaze to a solid sculptural form over time. These physical transitions of the media walk in tandem with my creative premise about the shifting and changing of time itself and the people in our lives, as well as how and what we remember of the past. Everything around us is changing all the time. I cannot remember the first iteration of the image on this panel, but what is set in memory is the final resolution. By scraping out the figure, it allows the aging process to capture just the memory of their presence in an ephemeral way, without the still stiffness of a traditional portrait, which only captures a single moment. This figure is still moving. Oil paint takes 50 years to dry at the molecular level after all. It has to breathe.

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.