Sarah Gillespie lives in Devon, England and works full-time as a painter, typically making tiny oil sketches outside in the summer months, and then very large studio canvases and charcoals in the winter. As a student, she studied 16th and 17th century techniques at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris. Today, Gillespie adheres to the simple truths that make landscape a perennially significant art form: above all, attentiveness to the nature of the world we live in and the place it will always occupy in the poetic imagination.
. The steadiness and intensity of gaze in Sarah Gillespie's paintings reveal an intuitive understanding; she appears to have developed her vision quietly and steadily—the fragility and beauty of nature fuse with a strong feeling for a specific 'place' and a willingness to be still and contemplative before it. Sarah’s pictures are imbued with a love of poetry, as she both seeks out the poetry in the world around her and also makes references to the works of romantic poets from Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Kathleen Raine and Mary Oliver. Like them she sees the eternal hand of the divine in our landscape, in the delicate balance of nature, in the ‘connectedness’ of the ecosystem, and in the cycle of the changing seasons and annual repetition that give each place a particular history and resonance.
An otherwise unremarkable bend in a river is elevated to splendor through Gillespie’s unique intensity imbued with great importance. What appears as impenetrable darkness is actually lively with light through crosshatching, rubbing, and the use of reductive techniques. It is Gillespie's attention to detail in the darks that punctuates the shiny river, sewing light into the composition. Gillespie has found expression for a range of moods encompassing the whole human condition—awe, grief, anger, and joy are all represented here in haunting forms. These are the emotions that inspired the work and they are expressed metaphorically and spiritually, directly and indirectly in her works: her awe at the beauty of the natural world touched by the hand of the divine; her anger at the willful destruction of our planet and its resources; her grief, sometimes made in the form of a wave crashing against rocks and other times a quiet, slow moving river.