Sarah Mayhew Craddock gets close to Sarah Spackman’s studies

Still life paintings possess a timeless appeal. An appeal that is perhaps owed to the increasingly frantic lives we lead in a society where transience appears to play a larger part than permanence; and it would seem that Oxford-based artist Sarah Spackman, who has developed a reputation for her intricate and exquisite still life paintings, knows this only too well.

This month, a new series of works by Sarah is on show at the Sarah Wiseman Gallery, in Summertown. Visitors to this solo exhibition should expect to encounter works that are smaller, almost jewel-like paintings, still life compositions that appear to be almost into being by the myriad of planes of luminous colour created using tiny, chisel shaped brushes.

“This new body of work concentrates on looking at simple objects and exploring their form through colour,” says the artist. “It concentrates on natural objects. Every painting is an exploration of the specific form and colour of the object. The space that these objects inhabit, and the space between them and me is all part of the painting. These are small paintings taking a closer look at things we have around us, but don’t always notice.

“I hope they will take the object out of the ordinary and make the viewer look again.”

Gallery owner, Sarah Wiseman, said: “Her paintings are softly hued and quiet in their presence, but nonetheless powerful and engaging to the viewer. Her palette is meticulous and organised, her colours carefully mixed before going anywhere near the canvas.”

Time spent in front of Spackman’s paintings reveal a profound world of relationships between objects and the attachments that we form with each of them. She is re-imagining quotidian objects as landscapes.

The domestic objects or curated scenes that she has selected to study aren’t simply gathered items collected by chance, but vehicles for something much more far reaching, an approach that chimes with the history of still life painting.

Her carefully composed compositions are created in the calm of a former punt-building workshop, the Edith Road Workshops complex.

“I love my studio,” says the artist. “It’s only a short bike ride from home, but when I am there, I am in a different world.

“I paint because I love it. It is my way of looking at the world and enables me to explore the uniqueness of everyday objects. In this very busy world where everything seems to move so quickly, I spend time contemplating the particular qualities of things.”

Just as Spackman is able to enter into a different world in her studio, so she invites those viewing her work to enter into a different world, or at least reassess the one that they exist in. Through her work, Spackman offers the viewer the opportunity to consider that there are many ways of looking at things.

Born in 1958 Sarah Spackman studied at Byam Shaw School of Art and later graduated from Camberwell School of Art in 1981. She lived in Italy and Yorkshire before moving to Oxford to be close to friends and family almost 30 years ago where she worked from a studio in Kirtlington before moving to the Edith Road Workshops. Her work is found in many private collections and a number of her paintings are also in the contemporary art collection of the AIB Bank.

Where and when
Sarah Spackman’s show A Closer Look, continues at Sarah Wiseman Gallery, Summertown, Oxford, until January 30