Sarah Shaw

The British artist Sarah Shaw graduated with distinction in Fine Art Painting at Falmouth College of Art in 1999. Since then, she has enjoyed significant success in her work, which subtly hovers between representational and abstract paintings. Her preferred medium is oil on canvas, although Shaw does use giclée and silkscreen for prints.

Shaw’s work is predominantly built up of large swathes of colour, beautifully blended, sometimes wispy, sometimes solid evoking a particular sense of vigor and movement to the landscape. Vastness is conveyed through the use of depth – the viewer feels as if a Shaw landscape stretches on forever, somewhere unknown; the back of the beyond. Gestural brushstrokes demarcate certain objects of interest, although these are nebulous and therefore open to significant interpretation.

She describes her inspiration as deriving from “a very quiet place, almost a place of meditation.” Her creativity centres on conditions “where an edgy quietness falls.” She strives to inject her work with enough room for personal interpretation by creating images that elegantly hover in a place between figuration and non-figuration. Shaw explains that her process “seems to always revolve around building up and stripping down of imagery, exploring different painterly languages than reducing down to the lowest denominator.” By stripping down specific images and thoughts she captures a precise moment in time. These snatches of images, sounds and thoughts form a coherence which describes as “like a painterly slideshow of memory.”

Shaw’s work often meaningfully captures some of the natural ebbs and flows of nature. A cresting wave or the slow descent of mist over a sea are masterfully depicted giving the work a spiritual, ethereal tone – as if there may be spirits or otherworldly beings concealed in that soft, light grey haze. Shaw works from inspiration but no work is a direct representation of a scene. Rather, an amalgamation of Shaw’s existence goes into the creation of a final piece – past journeys, future aspirations, sounds, images and ponderings all find their way to be translated into Shaw’s painting and ensure Shaw’s works are completely characteristic of her style, each and every time, utterly emotional yet fluid in their meaning. Over the course of her career, Shaw has exhibited all around the U.K. and her work is held in private collections worldwide.

In 2018 I was approached to create work for the foyer of Twr Y Felin. The only briefing for this commission was to come and stay at St David’s and be inspired by the beautiful landscape in that area.

I quickly realised that the story for my commission was to be found, not so much in the beauty of the landscape, but in the ancient places – the stories to be discovered and ruminated on in the old Norman churches, like the 6th century chapel of St Brynach; the pilgrims crosses carved in to exposed rocks; the legends that have lived through the ages.

We were regaled with tales that told of the legends of the area. The bleeding yew tree of Nevern in which one myth says that a monk was hanged on this tree for a crime of which he was innocent and that the tree still protests his innocence. The mysterious figure of St Govan and his Arthurian connections, whose tiny 13th-century chapel lies tucked away under the cliffs west of St Govan’s Head. Some scholars have identified him as the chivalrous Sir Gawain, hero of the early 15th century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the chapel as the Green Chapel which marks the denouement of the story.

I began to investigate the King Arthur connection to these ancient lands, feeling that this is where I would find the imagery for my commissioned pieces and quickly found the most wonderful of treasures.

A thousand years ago, Pembrokeshire was described as a land of mystery and enchantment in The Mabinogion, an 11th-century collection of folktales. I could almost see the ancient myths and legends come to life; The witches, and giants living alongside kings and heroes. Quests of honour, revenge, and love set against the backdrop of a country struggling to retain its independence. Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, shape shifters and magicians. Here be dragons.

The imagery for the paintings came thick and fast almost as if I was not so much making paintings but excavating the imagery.

I wanted to capture not only the storytelling of the area but the light at certain times of day over the awe-inspiring landscape, a sense of time passing…light changing…the things that can be discovered as light moves. I thought of words to associate with them; crepuscular, gloaming, the loom of the land. I wanted the paintings to be an amalgamation of the actual landscape with an imagined landscape which emerges with the light – the scattered stone circles, standing stones and monoliths telling their tales with the dying of each day.

In the year 2020 life as we knew it fundamentally changed. No one could comprehend what the outbreak of the novel coronavirus Covid -19 would mean to the world. George Orwell in his seminal novel 1984 only barely imagined a world gripped in fear banning individual free movement and the connection of peoples. Life, as we know it grinding to a fearsome halt.

Covid has had undeniable and horrific consequences on so many people’s lives – it would be easy to despair if not for the myriad silver linings that this darkness has highlighted; outcomes that could have a long-term positive impact on the planet and on humanity itself.

In this commission I’ve taken positives that can be drawn from this time of pandemic.

In general it seemed that the people I asked were happy and enthusiastic to share the positivity thatthat they perceived throughout those darkest of days.

People spoke of gratitude, love, a greater appreciation of the simpler things in life, closer bonds with family and friends and ironically, in a time of lockdown, a greater sense of connection through adaptive and innovative methods such as zoom, skype and WebEx where we found different ways to maintain not only our working lives but also our social lives, keeping in contact with loved ones and in some cases making new connections and friends.

Others spoke of the beauty of the returning of silence to our world; the capacity to again hear birdsong in cities, a deep appreciation for a planet where wildlife had the chance to return to its wildest form again: from goats taking over the empty lockdown streets of Llandudno to sika deer wandering through city streets and subway stations in Nara, Japan. They spoke of gladness to see a sky with ‘real clouds,
like in old paintings – a time in which there were no planes’ and the joy of seeing pollution levels in our rivers and seas decreasing. Nature receiving a well earned reset from the selfish machinations of mankind.