Sara Hodgson-Brown is known for intensely saturated paintings that use rich colour and expressive mark making to convey ever-changing light. Her work captures the impermanence of the moment and the ineffable sense of freedom found there.

As a former cabin dweller, wilderness guide, market gardener and art teacher, Sara has lived and worked in a myriad of far flung places that left their impression on her love of the natural world. More than just a landscape, Sara’s paintings use transitory times of day as a metaphor, where communion and reflection are the inherent result of self-identifying with the natural world. Sara’s paintings communicate a sense of urgency in their fading light, capturing a moment of in-between, numinous and transitory, that echoes our own existence and affirms our humanity and belonging.

Sara holds a BFA in painting and printmaking from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and has spent the past decade as an artist and educator helping art students learn and grow their own art skills. Her collaborations, projects and gallery works have been based in Canada, Italy, France and Switzerland and have been published in several international magazines. She produces several collections each year and welcomes students from around the world to develop their painting skills in workshops from her art studio, based at the foot of the Vercors mountains in the south of France.

My landscape paintings invite the viewer to a memory of a  place where we have been before; out walking and suddenly the last golden light of the day catches on the surface of the water, or snow, or mountain peaks, or clouds. It pulls us into a reverie of silence and timelessness. The bright light of the earlier day cannot hold the depth of itself here, the richness of the dusk. Our thoughts pool and eddy, slow into themselves. We are alone, with ourselves,  this light, and this moment with the earth. And it is freeing, somehow, in some small and important way. We sometimes hide our light, we deny our truth, we forget who we are. At least I do. Yet if we are lucky, there is a place or a moment in our life that reminds us that we are not separate. We belong. I create art to inspire people to feel more alive and connected to their truest self. To evoke this feeling; a fleeting moment of light, a moment of clarity and connection to ourselves and with the natural world. Inspired by eco-psychologists and poets like Wendell Berry and Joanna Macey, I view the wilderness landscape as a formative and inseparable aspect of the human psyche. And because I believe the days are always more transformative when there are some mountains and water around.

EXHIBITIONS

2023 BIZZ 'ART, LA NATURE ET LA PEINTURE, DRÔME, FRANCE.

2022 ART SALON INTERNATIONAL PARIS, FRANCE.

2022 EXHIBITION L’ART DE PARTAGER, ARGENTRÉ, FRANCE.

2017 - 2020 STUDIO PAINTER AND EXHIBITING ARTIST, LES ATELIERS DE LA CÔTE - SWITZERLAND.

2011 - 2015 EXHIBITING ARTIST
SIDNEY ANNUAL ART GALA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

2011 - 2014 STUDIO PAINTER AND SHOWING ARTIST SAANICH ARTISTS ASSOCIATION, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

GALLERY & MEDIA REPRESENTATION

VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE'S MAY, JUNE AND JULY ISSUES, 2021

SIDNEY PIER HOTEL GALLERY 2014-2018) VICTORIA, CANADA

AWARDS

2022 BEST IN SHOW, ART SALON INTERNATIONAL PARIS
PARIS, FRANCE

2012 BEST EMERGING ARTIST
SIDNEY ART GALA- BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

2011 BEST LIGHT IN LANDSCAPE
SIDNEY ART GALA - BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

EDUCATION

2008 BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS, PAINTING AND PRINTMAKING, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER, CANADA

2011 BACHELOR OF EDUCATION, VISUAL ARTS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER, CANADA