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UK landscape artist’s flirtation with light
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BRITISH landscape and figurative artist Sarah Butterfield described herself as an “eternal student of light.” Fascinated by the natural world, Butterfield devoted nearly 30 years to explore and convey in her works the relationship between man and nature.
“I like to capture all these different colors when the light creates highlights and the shadows. Light is always changing,” the 51-year-old London artist told Shanghai Daily.
“Morning light, which tends to be a bit bluer; the light at midday, which you think would make everything obvious and clear but actually in midday — when light is falling vertically and the shadows are compressed — can be very mysterious. It’s a paradox, really.”
After capturing iridescent afternoon sunsets in several series of works, Butterfield now focuses on the transition from sunset to night, and has done a series of paintings titled “Ocean, Lights and Palms.” The series, which unusually includes cars despite landscape and human figures that are commonly seen in her works, is among the 36 paintings exhibited in Shanghai for her solo exhibition that ended last Sunday.
The artist sat down with Shanghai Daily for a talk about her works and understanding of painting. She wore a lemon dress paired with an ocean blue flannel jacket, and her eyeshadow, in a bold palette of orange, peppermint, blue and purple, revealed her obsession with the interplay of colors.
Before being fully involved with painting, Butterfield was a self-employed architect for a couple years, which she said was “quite a struggle.”
“Doing architecture strengthened me. It was difficult — you have to think abstractly and came up with solutions. It was a very good mental discipline for me ... (and) gave me confidence,” she recalled. “But painting has always been where my heart lies.”
She picked up her paint brush when she suddenly ran out of jobs as an architect. In 1975, she went to the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford, where she learned how to paint with complimentary colors.
She knows how hard it is to find the right instructor from her own struggle to find the right person to teach her “how to paint instead of how to draw.” With that knowledge, she gave a painting demonstration called “How to paint like Sarah in five steps of color and tone” in Shanghai last Saturday. A similar video can be found on YouTube, showing how to paint a still life with a glass of water and complimentary colors.
Butterfield believes “everybody can paint as long as they are given the right instruction.” “That’s why I am quite passionate to teach these things … I try to make it more accessible for everybody,” she said.
Though it’s her first visit to Shanghai, Butterfield said she has always felt a deep bind with China; all of her works are somehow inspired by Chinese ink brush painting and calligraphy.
“Every brushstroke (of Chinese ink wash painting) is so expressive and minimalistic, doing as much work with each stroke as possible,” she said. “That’s something I try to do, to convey as much as I can with each brushstroke … to produce the painting with economy.”
What affects her most is Chinese screen paintings. The first one she stumbled over when browsing through books in the college library was a landscape painting on a six-panel screen.
A mass of black was painted on the first panel on the left with a few light marks spaced between the leaves. On the other side were a few dark marks of twigs on the mass of light. The transition was done in the middle four panels.
“It takes a lot of intellectual energy to analyze what you see and convey it in terms of dark on light and light on dark,” said Butterfield.
“If you look at trees by Monet, there’ll be marks of dark leaves against the light, and in other places are light leaves against the dark. It shows that nearly 2,000 years later, painters are underpinning the structures of their paintings and creating beauty and resolution in their paintings by doing the same kind of thinking that Chinese artists were doing 2,000 years ago, which is really something.”
Monet is clearly another huge influence on Butterfield, especially his working methods “to create a moment in time.” Like Monet, Butterfield sets alarms — 8am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm and 6pm — to work on different paintings. She stays only 90 minutes maximum on each canvass because all the shadows change in that period of time.
“This is the way Monet worked. He only stayed on one painting for 45 minutes. For any given hour that he was working, Monet would have a sunny version, a cloudy version and a half-sunny, half-cloudy version of painting. It’s a brilliant way of working,” she said.
Since 1986, Butterfield has held six solo exhibitions in London’s West End galleries. Her works are collected by the Royal Academy of Art, Queen Elizabeth, the Prince of Wales, and British celebrities such as film director Richard Kurtis.
One of the major changes in her career life was being a royal artist on a tour to India with Prince Charles in 2006.
“Every time I had exhibitions in all those years from 1986 to 2005, I always wrote a letter in hand to the Prince of Wales. I know he is interested in art and architecture. I don’t why I did. I think I just had these instincts to write an invitation to the prince and tell him about the painting, and see what happens,” she recalled.
After the fourth time, she got a phone call asking her to go on an art tour with the prince.
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