Sarah Welsh

Portland, Oregon, USA

Biography

SARAH WELSH is an oil painter who resides in Portland, Oregon. Over the years she has practiced many art forms; dance, acting, creative writing and the fine arts. She was a professional actor who earned a degree from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and performed in several off-Broadway theatres in New York as well as Equity houses in Seattle, Washington, before earning her Masters in Education from Antioch University Seattle in 1994. While raising her children in Portland, she worked with PlayWrite, Inc., where she served disadvantaged youth as a playwright mentor, backdrop painter, actor and director. Sarah went on to develop and run a program for Sojourner School as an Arts Integration Specialist, followed by many years of teaching art in public schools.

Sarah has studied art at The Northwest College of Art and The Drawing Studio, both in Portland, Oregon. She has shown her work in instructor shows at Multnomah Arts Center where she continues to teach part time. Currently Sarah is writing a lot, making collages and accepting her fate as a late-blooming oil painter with pleasure.  She is drawn to painting figures or landscapes that have  significance in her life and likes to remain open to ways that imagery can occasionally upend a plan with the unexpected. Or sometimes she paints purposefully without a plan and allows organic abstractions to emerge as an ongoing conversation with the creative process.

 

Statement : I am bending the time

I am bending time because I want to transform past, present and future in imagery. I am bending time by rearranging the present or reimagining memories to allow the unexpected into a painting. If I allow time to bend, spiral or transform, I can heal past, present and future together through imagery. The process of creating itself offers me an opportunity to experience the surprizing alchemy of what happpens when I practice intent, while remaining open to the unknown. If I succeed, I enter the “flow state” *, in which time does not exist. In this stae of mind, I know I am an indivisible part of everything. I belong. I can plumb my consciousness for what is true now, with what wants to rise and be expressed on the page with my willing hand. Sometimes, what is true one day is the frustration of revisiting old habits and assumptions, that don’t serve anything more than to clarify what I don’t want. This is to be expected. I am learninbg to trust the times in which my work doesn’t yet “work” - as part of the whole art-making process. There is a natural contraction and release in the birthing of an art piece. It’s a spiraling pathway from imagining to creating, to reimagining and recreating.; a timeless continuum. This state of mind is an opportunity to surrender to the fact of impermanence. When I truly can (surrender to impermanence) anything is possible! Anything can be expressed on the page: from gut-wrenching grief that nothing lasts- to the pure relief and excitement of realizing that because nothing lasts we are free! When I am free I am able to bend time. When I am free and art “works” it feels like this:

 

(Flow)

 

It’s stunning how

My attended heart

Becomes water…

Flooding in claps

Not contained,

But spilling an elixir

Of nourishment

Through the stones…

 

 

*(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)