Saskatchewan Arts Board

Imagine painting a portrait or landscape in an hour, outside, while being filmed and talking to a home audience. Sarah Jane Holtom has accomplished this feat more than 40 times on The Painting from Life with Sarah Holtom Show, which airs on Access 7 in Yorkton and area.

“My interest is in painting with oils from life, completing work in one sitting or in a time limit,” Holtom says. “My quick oil sketches are the best exercise for me to become a stronger painter.”

Once she received an Independent Artists grant from the Arts Board, she pitched her idea to the community station. “My intentions were to be somewhat entertaining in that I would share thoughts while painting, but my main focus was to complete the painting in the time limit,” she says. “The brush marks are direct reflections of thoughts and observations, rather than losing the trail of thought process in over-rendering.”

Holtom compares talking while painting to a train wreck. “Trying to use both the left and right tracks of my brain at the same time is somewhat embarrassing.” Her friends have called the show a comedy, “which is good, I think.”

There are also many challenges with plein air painting: travel, loading and unloading materials, close encounters with bugs and wildlife, and the ever-changing light and weather. “I have come to find bugs stuck in my paintings charming. Each painting is a recording of a real experience out of my comfort zone and studio. It makes the work more exciting to me,” says Holtom.

Holtom’s and Brandon Doty’s show, Blind Contour, is touring with the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils (OSAC), and their work in the Dunlop Art Gallery’s Mind the Gap exhibition was selected for an extended tour, which goes all the way to Ottawa. Three of Holtom’s pieces have also been added to the Arts Board’s Permanent Collection this year.

For more on Holtom’s work, visit www.sarahholtom.com.

Photo: Robert Fougere