Internal World

How did your creative interest start and develop?

Sarah. My mother would have liked to be an artist and had many creative interests, but she had this sort of terror of pursuing it. So, she projected her artistic inclinations onto me in a very lovely way.

I remember clearly, in my first year at school, being asked to paint a picture of the seaside. I did what everybody was doing: painting a band of yellow and a couple of bands of blue. I wanted to add a seagull but was worried the paint would get muddy. So, I decided to use sticky white paper to put birds in the sky. I remember that enjoyment of being in the middle of a creative act, thinking about the materials. That is still very much part of my work today, considering what affordances the materials must have to enlarge the possibility of a piece of work. I was hooked already.

That year, I won an art prize; my teachers recognised that I was driven by creating things. I have a photograph of me, aged five, being handed a little watercolour box at school. From that young age, I knew I would be an artist; I was sure of that.

I was quite a solitary child; I loved art as an escape into my world of imagining. I constantly looked at maps, drew my own, and designed mazes. I created treasure hunts in my imagination, in sketchbooks, and sometimes in the real world, and that desire to map things remains in my work.

In secondary school, I felt like a social misfit; I was pretty shy and didn’t enjoy the world of adolescence. The art room was my place of sanctuary. I can remember my first art lesson. We were asked to make a forest scene from silhouettes cut with scissors from black paper. My teacher said to me, Wow, that’s amazing. I was often validated as an artist, and I was just passionate about it. As an adolescent, my art wasn’t remarkable, but I felt I knew where I was going.

After school, I did a Foundation at the Central School of Art, which was wonderful. A lovely tutor found me working in the art room one lunchtime; she said with great certainty, you will be an artist because of your tenacity. On days when I think I’m a terrible artist, that’s something I hold onto.

The imaginary world of my paintings goes back to my early childhood. In that sort of liminal before-sleep state, I would picture myself as if I were in a tiny boat in the middle of this vast black sea, and the sea would just be rocking me. It was almost like life in utero. I lost touch with that experience by the time I reached adolescence, but the memory is there.

We didn’t visit the sea much when I was a child. That could be why it’s such a powerful symbol in my imagination. I was born in landlocked Zambia. I spent my first two years there before my parents returned to the UK.

When I finished my Foundation, I went to art school in Bristol. Many of my tutors had either been part of or on the fringes of the St Ives School. That movement influenced a lot of the teaching. Cornwall became an extraordinary place to me, and I would try to get there as often as possible, and I still do.

Bristol didn’t have the dynamism of London; it felt a little flat. After two terms, I was confused about where my work was going, and I decided to take
a year out; I never returned.

I booked a flight to India and stayed there for six months. That was a very formative experience, but it had nothing to do with the sea this time. Travel is still an essential part of my work process. I moved from one place to another and documented that time fairly figuratively. I drew all the time in a sketchbook, which was difficult because it attracted a crowd. It was a vibrant experience, and by the time I came back to Bristol, I had already sent a letter saying I was not coming back to art school; I knew that I wanted to go on travelling.

So, did you travel more at that time?

Sarah. I was sharing a studio with an art school peer by that time, and he was offered a house-sitting job in the south of France. He offered to take me along as part of the package. So, we looked after somebody’s house in Saint Rémy de Provence for about six months until we were asked to move out at short notice.

With a farmer’s permission, we found a cave to live in for the next six months. The whole thing was an amazing experience, a total immersion in the extraordinary landscape of the foothills of the Alps. I would put on my oil paint-covered overalls every morning. I’d take my rucksack, a little wooden painting box I had made myself, and walk out into the hills and find some incredibly remote spots to sit and paint.

I think my work at that stage had gone back to a kind of post-impressionism, probably influenced by the setting, surrounded by scenes Cézanne had painted and living a stone’s throw from where Van Gogh was incarcerated in Saint Rémy. I was trying to avoid the pretty view tradition of landscape painting and to get closer to something more elemental.

I had the good fortune that my friend with whom I went to France with was an extraordinary entrepreneur. He’s one of those very few artists who loves to sell. From the get-go, he sold everything we both did. We’d paint like crazy, build up exhibitions, drive everything back to the UK in two cars and organise showing our work in London. Setting up our own exhibitions was the most sensible thing to do economically. But I’ve never been very enthusiastic about marketing my work.

After the cave, we bought a wreck of a house, more like a stone box with one light bulb, with a well at the bottom of the garden. It was a project, and we spent ten years there altogether. The rooms and house developed, and I had a studio. Spending more time in the studio, I got less interested in this tradition of representational painting. That’s quite romantic and presents the landscape for the viewer’s pleasure. I became more interested in big forces, something that couldn’t be packaged that way. So, my work became more abstract and studio-based but still strongly driven by walking and drawing in the landscape.

“Walking and being in wild places feeds this world of imagination, and then I bring that back to the studio.”

When did you come back to the UK?

Sarah. Eventually, we returned to the UK because it was getting ridiculous transporting vast amounts of work back to London, so it made sense to move there, which was our marketplace.

That relationship ended, and I wasn’t selling so much; I didn’t feel motivated to do it. So, like many artists, I’ve done all kinds of other jobs along the way.

There was a middle phase in my artistic life where I did therapy training, which was long and a real boot camp, but that eventually allowed me to earn a living by working for a small part of the week, and I’d paint the rest of the time.

It became integrated with my work. As a therapist, I started thinking a lot about creativity and whether it’s good for people’s mental health, which is a trope that we often come out with. But if so, then why? And how, under what circumstances, does that happen?

I started teaching in Greece every summer to complete beginners looking for enjoyable, uplifting, and creative things to do. I’d been thinking, what is it about doing something creative that can make you feel good? After all, making art can also be depressing and can make you feel quite crazy at times. I was thinking a lot about that and teaching a lot of workshops.

I mentioned to somebody I knew working at the Royal College of Art that I wanted to write a book about manual creativity and mental health. She said, it’s funny you should say that, but I saw this notice about a funded PhD research post in Falmouth just yesterday. They’re looking for someone to research creativity and mental health. I looked it up online. It was complicated that it was in Cornwall, but I knew it had my name on it.

So, I applied for it and got it. I spent over three years researching the relationship between creativity and mental health. It was a brilliant opportunity. I did lots of related work alongside and afterwards. This included running creative groups in homeless hostels in London and in the field of social prescribing. Where GPs suggest various creative groups to people facing mental health challenges. That time and experience were very rich, but I do almost no therapy or arts facilitation work these days. I’ve got more freedom now to devote time to my creative practice.

“My take on the potential usefulness of creativity for mental health, in a nutshell, is that making stuff is like life in miniature. If a workshop is delivered well, it can be a safe space where failure isn’t incapacitating. You can learn to muddle through, to try something out, to learn from the experience, and then to have another go. People face big life challenges, so it’s gaining the confidence to say, that was a bit rubbish, but I’ll try again, and this time, it will be better. Imagination is transformative because it can show you how things might be otherwise.”

Did the research inform your work moving forward?

Sarah.  It underlined for me that working in a creative field is a journey; it can be challenging, and frustration is necessary. There’s something about learning to meet with the unpredictability of your materials and circumstances. Accepting that things won’t work seamlessly from one painting to the next.

I like the freedom to let paintings develop however they want; my materials are my collaborators, and I’m not in charge. That’s one thing that came out strongly in my research through watching people in creative groups making stuff and observing my creative process.

The process is like a board game, with the materials on one side and me on the other. I make a move, and the materials come back with, OK or No, we won’t let you do that. Then you have lots of new potential next moves. I love not knowing how it will turn out. I would hate to get into a rut where I was repeatedly producing the same painting.

My paintings are a complex interaction between this imaginary world and the material world and my little bit of agency, the bit of me that decides what kind of painting I’d like to make. But that counts for very little in the middle of all the rest of it. That’s thrilling and keeps me interested; I’d get bored if I thought I was in control of it all.

The geometric elements in my paintings come from a desire to represent something of the order of nature alongside all the chaos and the human stories surrounding it. When I look at my paintings, I know I’m working from a particular feeling centred in a specific place. But sometimes, it’s an imaginary place, the kind of place you visit in dreams.

It works well for me to always have loads of stuff on the go; I’ve always worked like that; whether I’m working for an exhibition or not, I’ve always got lots of things on the boil. The paintings talk to each other; you put two paintings up on the wall and return a week later, and they’ll converse. One of them will tell you that the other painting needs this or to get rid of that. When a painting works, there’s always a moment where it says to you, OK, I’m done.

Over the years I lived in London, I spent lots of time out of the city on painting trips to Cornwall, Greece, and many residencies. Eventually, the pressures of London got to me, and the pandemic was my excuse to leave. Living in Rye turned out perfectly because I could walk to the coast and draw by the sea.

I’ll paint imaginary places, but everything I see, including Camber, the Nature Reserve and Fairlight, feeds into the felt sense that inspires the paintings. I also often paint with a book of poetry open next to me. My imaginary world is full of poetry, songs and histories. Often, a group of words will be the key to the feeling that the painting gets constructed around.

My work is often about a place, but it’s in a foggy way that’s not purely visual and certainly isn’t purely memory. It’s a whole collection of ideas centred on the feeling of a place.

I’m also interested in the viewer’s experience, and I like the idea of paintings as spaces to dream in, as open to interpretation. They’re imaginary worlds in which you could live, like the painter Ben Nicholson said.

Travel is still quite a big part of my work process. I’ve just spent three weeks in Ibiza, which has allowed me to work outside, do loads of walking and drawing in beautiful wild environments, and paint daily. When I travel, I take large sheets of tissue paper and paint on them because they weigh almost nothing. I can roll them up and later laminate them to heavier paper or a linen canvas. It doesn’t matter if they get damaged, torn, or crumpled; they can be shoved into a suitcase.

On my recent trip, I had 15 paintings in progress, all stuck around the walls of our rented accommodation. Some I went back and worked on again; at least half of them led to something more substantial.

“I enjoy the craft aspects of fine art. I never want to work digitally because I like the sort of dance with the materials and doing things with my hands.”

How do you decide when a painting is finished?
Sarah. When a painting is working, it eventually tells me. There’s a certainty about it. But often, that takes some time. Sometimes, I persuade myself something’s finished, and then I don’t like it later, so I start working on it again. I frequently ruin things that probably were OK, but you push them further, and that’s all part of the messy accidental process. I often make a frame in parallel.

I’m working on new pieces to show to Marcus at McCully & Crane and to some other galleries. At the moment, my work is evolving in an exciting direction. I feel like working more freely and on a larger scale.

I’m so lucky to have one of my favourite galleries here in Rye, McCully & Crane; it’s great working with them. The rest of my current sales are in
the US. That’s come about entirely through Instagram. I was approached by a picture dealer in New York and a fine art consultancy based on the East Coast, who regularly sell my work. Plus, I get US and UK buyers approaching me directly.

I’m not a social media person, and I resisted going anywhere near it for a long time. Someone I know researching the creative industries said you must have an Instagram account to market your work more successfully. It’s completely transformed my approach to selling paintings. I have to try much less hard now because I have a global market and can let my paintings speak for themselves.

Sarah Desmarais
Fine art painter and printmaker
www.sarahdesmarais.com
Instagram

Represented by
www.mccullyandcrane.com
www.torijonesstudio.com