Illustrated Interview #1: Sarah Hoskins

Phig Billy here, your friendly neighbourhood gonzo cartoonist, writing with the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of illustrated interviews with local artists. The premise is simple: first I find an artist willing to put his/her reputation on the line and take up a madcap artistic challenge.

The design of this challenge is based on the specialism or type of work favoured by the artist in question, and requires some kind of artistic dialogue or collaboration with yours truly. And then we also get together and have a good old-fashioned chin-wag about life and art and stuff, which I record and transcribe the highlights thereof.

Got it? Good. So for the first of these features I would like to introduce you to a charming and immensely talented painter (and occasional stone sculptor) by the name of Sarah Hoskins.

I had the good fortune to meet Sarah in her studio at Gallery 86 in Crediton about eight months ago, back when I was doing the rounds of local galleries trying to get them interested in my photos. I remember stepping into her studio, inhaling the intoxicating aroma of oil paint and surveying four walls jam-packed with striking visionary portraits of all sizes – an impressive experience. It felt like stepping into an alternate reality where every surface is adorned with some kind of pattern, and people have crazy head-dresses and strangely muscular necks. Welcome to the world according to Sarah Hoskins.

Background
Sarah grew up in Exeter before attending college at Wimbledon School of Art. “I didn’t have any choice about what I wanted to do: painting was ‘it’,” she said. Sadly, she didn’t have the greatest time at college: her gifts went largely unrecognized and she found the teaching too prescriptive. She finished in ‘96, went to Cardiff for a few years (“There weren’t any birds, it was really weird.”) and then, post 9/11, the opportunity came to “run away” to Cyprus College of Art.

In Cyprus Sarah got into stone carving. “Doing stone-carving was something I’d never been taught to do, so I was free, I didn’t have any voices in my mind telling me what I should be doing or how I should be doing it. It silenced the voices of college, because college had depleted my self-confidence.”

Gallery 86
When she came back from Cyprus, she fell straight back into painting and lived in Topsham and then London for a while. After “trying the London thing”, Sarah moved back to Devon and this time Moretonhampstead. She was brought into the Gallery 86 Crediton-based collective by her friend Isabel Merrick.

Gallery 86 comprises six artists (Isabel has since left), and the building holds two studios (Sarah’s and Andrew Vaccari’s) and two exhibition spaces: downstairs is used as a shop for members of the collective, and upstairs has regularly changing exhibitions and is available to hire. “It’s fun being part of a group, I enjoy sharing a space with people. We started having group crits recently once a month, I’m working on a painting with Jane Rock. Painting is such a solitary activity, you can get so isolated. It’s good to share.”

Portraits
As you may have deduced, a large proportion of Sarah’s work is made up of portraits. “There’s just some magic about painting a face,” she said.

And quite a few of those portraits are self-portraits. “It’s not that I’m self-obsessed! It’s just that my story is the one I know best, and, therefore, I tell it more truthfully and honestly,” she said. So what’s her favourite part of the face? “I suppose the eyes. The eyes are the part that makes a painting work. If the eyes are full of personality then the rest of the portrait… doesn’t have to be so good!”

Costumes & Patterns
“I’d been doing portraits for a long time and they’d generally been naked: universal and timeless. I decided one day that clothing would be a good idea, and as soon as I started putting patterns on, I realized how good they were. It was so good that I had to do it again!”

Sarah told me how her creative process has been revolutionized since getting broadband, and how she enjoys looking up random things on Google and collaging then into her compositions. She also has a penchant for funky hats and striking hairstyles.

Recipe for Success
“About two years ago I thought I needed to find of a way of painting that mean I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time I did a new painting, find a ‘way in’ that made life easier but that didn’t detract from the creative process, it just made the creative process easier to access. I’ve been hunting around for a recipe and I feel I’ve stumbled across a few things: costume, pattern, portraits, taking things from old paintings. Looking for distinctive ingredients that only I mix.”

The Illustrated Interview Challenge
As Sarah is a portrait artist par excellence, I suggested that, while we chatted, Sarah sketch my portrait and I sketch hers. She effortlessly knocked out two fantastic charcoal sketches of me, and I learnt that she has a very cute way of squinting at you when she draws you. It’s a technique, apparently.

(Click on the images to view them at full size.)

My sketch of her was atrocious, and had I reproduced it here then I have no doubt she would never have spoken to me again… so I went away and worked up something a bit more respectable based on that sketch and a couple of photos I took of her. The boats, cakes and bird on her head are all allusions to motifs in Sarah’s own paintings. Again, you can click on the image to view it full size.

Want some more?
You’re in luck. Sarah’s newly revamped website is phat, phresh AND phunky. Moreover, Sarah is having a solo exhibition from July 26 to August 7 (closed Wednesdays and Sundays) at Gallery 86, 86 High Street, Crediton, which I’d strongly urge you to drop in on.

Tell her Phig sent you.

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