Sarah Pickstone
- Faculty
Biography
Sarah Pickstone is a painter who lives and works in London. She works from her studio at Cubitt Artists and shows both in Europe and internationally. Her work is held in many private collections and in the public collections of: The Royal Academy of Arts, Société Générale – UK Collection, Saatchi Collection, The Walker Art Gallery – National Museums Liverpool, The Mercer Art Gallery collection – Yorkshire Museums, and the British School at Rome.
Pickstone studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and was awarded the Rome Scholarship in painting. She spent a year working in Italy, which made a significant impression on her work. Pickstone continues to research and paint in Italy, spending part of the year working in Umbria.
She won the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 and was a runner-up in 2004.
On drawing
Drawing is key. My paintings are about structures – historical and visual – process and the architecture of colour. Often, I use a drawn template to repeat and create a framework or a motif stolen from art history, which can then be re-presented in a contemporary context. And so, the drawings are the bones of a painting.
I like the tension created by this linear structure and the physical action – the process of the painting. Free drawing has a direct correspondence to the unconscious and resists the mechanical, the digital.
I love looking at artists' drawings to identify their thinking – the clarity and straightforward unclutteredness of a working drawing. It’s so nice not to worry about background, material and scale – to carry an idea forward like the shell on the back of a snail.
