Sarah Woods | Light & Land

The new collection by painter Sarah Woods has been created throughout the spring and early summer of 2024 in response to the beautiful coastal landscape between St Ives and the Zennor.

It includes large scale paintings and a series of smaller landscape studies in Sarah’s distinctly tranquil palette. Each painting is framed in unfinished oak, bringing focus to the natural simplicity of process and materials.

“This collection for the New Craftsman features the coastline from St Ives and the West Coast, on canvases painted in my Newlyn studio. The studio is the quietest space, which allows for a meditation on the landscapes I see. Each painting conveys a feeling of the spaces I am drawn to for their balanced compositions, their openness, and the rawness of the sea and land. There is something in the tranquillity of brushstrokes and simplicity of colour, tone and movement that informs each piece. The richness and warmth of the days inspire saturated palettes and hues mixed from cerulean blue and yellow ochre, shades found in May and June in the softness of skies or the movement of sea. The studio has such a beautiful work feeling when I am painting from St Ives. Light, from the moment the sun rises, brings dreamlike shades that I translate onto canvas when I reach the studio. Familiar, simple forms are repeated until I feel them intuitively, seasonally shifting between a gentle landscape and an elemental space. Each painting is determined by a balance of light, a composition created with outlines of land against open spaces, sea and sky - outlines and contours of the landscape known so intimately by my brush and canvas. 

‘Making an object look like what you see is not as important as making the whole square you paint it on feel like what you feel about the object’ Georgia O’Keeffe. 

Each of my paintings holds a simplicity and connectedness to the landscapes I am drawn to, captured along the coast and created through an intuitive, gentle process in the studio”.

Sarah Woods, 2024