Born in Coventry, artist Sarah Lees settled in Carmarthenshire to study Wildlife Illustration. She freelanced for a number of years before returning to Carmarthen School of Art where she now runs Access to Art, whilst continuing to paint and exhibit.

Sarah’s work focuses on the visual language of the land and how it has been shaped. Her landscapes are empty of human presence, showing only the raw design left behind: stripped back boundaries, thickets and thin stands, tracks and river bends. She is preoccupied with the edge of the land where cultivation and wildness coincide, and revisits favourite places repeatedly to try and capture what makes landscape so compelling.

She paints on panel, paying close attention to surface detail and overpainting with delicate, muted glazes to achieve depth. She
also works back with imprints and marks to give expression, paying close attention to the finished surface. These surfaces show signs of manipulation, with details scratched into the panel.

“In the spring my mind turns to wild places as I see the fresh, thin imprint of sun on the fields and woods. The warmth brings a new palette of earth tones, and ancient field markings and recumbent stones emerge as a recurrent theme.”