Sara MacCulloch

Sara MacCulloch

Sara MacCulloch grew up in Nova Scotia. She received BFA (1992) and her MFA (2019) from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax.  She has lived in many places across Canada, shown extensively in North America, and has gallery representation in Toronto, Maine, New York, and Chicago.  She has taught painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Ontario College of Art, and has attended artist residencies in Sweden, Maine, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia. Her work can be found in many private and public collections including TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, University of Toronto, University of Iowa, Department of Foreign Affairs, Royal Bank of Canada, and Gotlands Kunstmuseum in Sweden. Her work is included in the book Carte Blanche, vol 2: Painting (an overview of Canadian contemporary painters) and Land and Sea (contemporary Nova Scotia painters), and her work is the subject of a book currently in production by St. Thomas University in Fredericton, NB. She recently relocated from Halifax to Toronto but continues to spend as much of her time on the east coast as possible.

Artist Staement:

Each of my paintings is an attempt to hold onto a moment that is fleeting.

The light, the time of day, what the place means to me, who is standing beside me while I am seeing what I am seeing- these things are all at play as I make the work.

I spend a lot of time looking at things as I walk around in landscapes or sit in rooms. I note the colour, the feel. I sometimes take a series of photographs, or I make a watercolour sketch- doing that can help jog my memory when I am back in the studio, especially if a long period of time has elapsed.

I tend to spend summers absorbing and experiencing places. I feel like I am documenting everything, and mostly not until later- when I have had time to put things in perspective- do I know what I need to paint. Sometimes a painting will come even years after I experience the place.

Other times I experience something and go immediately to my studio and paint it.

Sometimes I will paint the same moment more than once- as if there are layers to it- and all of them need to be acknowledged.

The challenge for me is to capture what a place looked like- so that it is recognizable, but also have it still feel alive. To remain open with the painting as I am making it- to see what may happen in the studio, how the paint wants to behave. Intuition within that moment, letting things flow. I don’t start with an exact idea of what the painting will be when I am finished.  There is something intangible I am looking to get to-- and I never really know how it will come about. Sometimes it doesn’t, and after a day of painting, I wipe the whole surface off.

I almost always do my paintings in one go- one session in the studio.  This is to allow for clarity in purpose, but also to give the work a sense of immediacy.  I want the paintings to be direct and fluid.   There is a fine line between overworked, unfinished, and resolved paintings, and I am always trying to find that balance.