Sarah Ann Weber – Circle Foundation for the Arts

What themes does your work involve?

By creating environments, I am able to explore gender, decoration and beauty. Focusing on the floral and exotic, my highly detailed, dense compositions become places where growth and entropy, figure and ground, intertwine. My work may foster the hallucinatory experience of seeing a mirage, where navigating the environment is a disorienting but pleasurable experience.

Describe your creative process.

My process of drawing is intuitive. I usually begin a composition with quick, gestural scribbles or paint pours. Then I slow down, honing in on small, intertwining sections. I treat colored pencils like paint, blending the wax-based pigments to create smooth gradients. The marks stay small to draw the viewer in close, where patience is rewarded with subtlety of color and hidden forms revealed.

What influences your work? What inspires you? Why do you make art?

My work brims with biomorphic forms and gestural marks that mimic the succulents and flowers of southern California (a place I have called home for the last six years), but the compositions are also punctuated with scribbles and brushstrokes that remind the viewer that the spaces are invented. I am inspired by nature in all its forms (wild, tamed, synthetic, fantastic) and how people exist and become part of their environment.

What is good art? What makes a piece of art great?

I think a work of art is successful if it leaves a viewer with a lingering experience of wonder.

What is the role of the artist today?

I believe it is an artist’s responsibility to be present, reflect, and bear witness to an ever-changing world. Although my artwork has never been overtly political, I work intuitively and from an emotional place, so my practice is undoubtedly affected by how I feel about everything that is going on in the world.