This week’s featured artist is Sarah Symes, a textile artist currently living in California. Sarah creates her artwork from scratch, hand-dyeing different colors of cloth for each piece before cutting, stitching, and layering the entire composition together.
In her email, Sarah mentioned that the California coastline is an inspiration for much of her art, and I could definitely see that influence in several of her works.
This piece for instance, entitled Beach Front Living, uses repeating horizontal lines to represent ocean waves. The individual colored squares are no doubt abstractions of buildings, windows, and—quite possibly—even people.
I love the soft geometry at play here as well. Despite hundreds of squares, rectangles, and lines, the entire composition is still very organic—very “alive.”
It’s the upward movement of squares and rectangles that impart an idea of growth, with those horizontal lines giving a slight sense of side-to-side movement as well.
And while all of Sarah’s artwork have distinct colors in them, I especially liked the hues in this one, Scarlet Skies.
(Then again, I usually enjoy a splash red in any work of art.)
Unlike Beach Front Living, many of the colored squares seemed to float farther in front of, or behind, other squares. Sarah used transparent cloth and several different-sized squares to create that depth and add interest to this piece.
And here’s the last textile artwork for today, fittingly entitled, Old Fashioned Romance.
With elegant patterns and a gorgeous (and soothing) color palette, it does indeed invoke another time and place.
To see more of Sarah’s unique textile artwork, or to commission one for yourself, head on over to www.sarahsymes.com.