Collection: Sarah Hunter

After graduating with a BA Hons degree in Graphic Design in the UK, Sarah made a successful career as a graphic designer and Illustrator for over twenty years. Since moving to Canada, the artist has been pursuing a passion for encaustic painting. A sense of place is very important to Sarah, and painting the Ontario landscape has been grounding to this place now called home.

Over the years, the artist has developed a love for the physical wax surface of encaustic, which when applied in its molten state has both immediacy and spontaneity allowing their “paintings” to develop a life of their own. Sarah has learned to control the medium but, when the heat hits the wax, it is always a surprise. There are so many subtleties of heat and how the wax and pigment respond to it. With encaustic, one must embrace the accident and the mystery; which Sarah does admirably.

Sarah applies the pigmented wax in many luminous and complex layers. Oil pastels, raw pigments, shellac and graphite are incorporated and fused into the surface with a blow torch. Each layer is reheated to be made smooth or built up to create texture. And, Sarah often etches or carves into it to reveal the history of the work; the strata of the landscape, if you like.

Sarah explores the balance between representation and invention with the hope that a kind of distillation has taken place where the artist’s passion for, as well as the essence of the Ontario landscape comes softly through.