Sarah Jane Brown

Sarah Jane Brown lives on the rugged Welsh coast, where her environment, and previous maritime career, have instilled a deep affinity with the sea. She studied ‘Fine Art - Painting’ at the West Wales School of the Arts, graduating with a first class honours degree.

Brown’s career as a full time professional artist has steadily gained momentum and recognition and her work now collected internationally. She has exhibited widely in the UK and has had many successful solo shows. Recently she has exhibited with the Royal Society of Marine Artists at the Mall Galleries in London and The Royal Cambrian Academy in North Wales. She is a qualified Member of the Guild Society of Artists.

Sarah combines her knowledge of traditional techniques with contemporary working practice. Her paintings are an outpouring of personal feeling and a strong sense of place; using the landscape metaphorically to describe thoughts and emotions.

"Our surroundings form a part of us, they shape our perception and colour our thoughts and ideals. For me they are a vehicle to describe more internal aspects of our physical, emotional and spiritual selves. There is something about being immersed in nature that gives clarity and focus to the space within. My approach to landscape is therefore introspective and intimate. I enjoy the versatility of oil paint, and find it the best medium to convey the varied sensations of being in the landscape; sometimes calm, restorative, or spiritually uplifting and at other times wild, dynamic, rejuvenating and mentally energising. Oil paint is also equally responsive to my internal thoughts and feelings.

I walk the coast path or the beach near my home in Pembrokeshire to observe and absorb; meditative space and light, magical junctures of land, sea and sky, endlessly changing colours, reflections and atmospheric conditions. I know it so well, after years of collecting observations it is ingrained. I photograph, make sketches and painted studies to get the landscape 'under my skin'.

In the studio these observations are transformed, becoming more expressive as I engage with the physicality of painting, sometimes veering towards abstraction. My style is expressive and combines a variety of methods; staining, glazing and blending in many layers, gradually building up thickness and texture. Paint is applied with brushes, knives, rags and sometimes fingers. It is painted, scraped, flicked, spattered and even poured on, (and sometimes off again!), until the finished painting emerges.

Titles are deliberately ambiguous. They emerge from phrases that cross my mind whilst I am in the studio or out in the landscape, sometimes they are excerpts from poetry, or are often just snippets of my own windswept thoughts.”