Sarah Thwaites has lived and worked near Abergavenny for the past 15 years. She was born in London, and studied at Wimbledon School of Art and Goldsmith’s College. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kilvert Gallery in Clyro, the Riverside Gallery, Crickhowell, and Hereford City Art Gallery. She has appeared in prestigious group shows such as The Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries in London.
Her paintings make connections and cross boundaries between worlds. They are intense and richly beautiful, but also intimate and lyrical. They are abstract in their layering and texture, created by using fragments from many sources, scored, distressed and overlaid with graphite, paint and sand; but they are figurative in recollecting moments of personal vision of her surroundings, and in their symbolism of open books, landscape, trees and weather. Sarah Thwaites' work is individual and private, but it possesses those resonances which mysteriously can make a poem, a piece of music or a painting universal. It is easy to understand, contemplating the richness of her picture making, why human beings have scribed and daubed and marked for over 40,000 years. Like dance, and song, and story-telling, painting feeds the soul.

Dr Peter Wakelin

click to view CV