SARA PITTMAN | WHAT SOFTNESS CARRIES
Papered Sky, oil, acrylic, collage on canvas, 36 x 38 inches
Foster/White presents What Softness Carries, Sara Pittman's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Pittman's compositions appear both floral and of the clouds, imbued with a sense of lightness and billowing motion. The collection of 11 paintings will be on view from First Thursday, November 6 through Saturday, November 22.
Scatterplay, acrylic, oil, collage on canvas, 50 x 40 inches
Softness is not the absence of strength. It is the form that carries it.
These paintings live in the tension of transformation where forms surface and recede, where nothing is fixed, and everything is shifting. I work instinctually, letting each piece unfold without demanding resolution. What emerges is not a fixed image, but a felt space hovering between abstraction and memory, gesture and emotion.
Nature is the language I return to: sky, petals, and light slipping through. These elements speak to the weight of motherhood and to time as something both tender and unrelenting. Each painting is composed of layered acrylic grounds, precisely cut canvas forms, and finished in luminous oil glazes. Compositions that hold the dualities within the work: deliberate and instinctive, present and fading, soft yet sharp.
The addition of collaged canvas (painted, cut, layered, and embedded) marks a new direction in my process, allowing form to echo, interrupt, or slip away. These fragments act as anchors of memory and change, capturing the tension between what stays and what disappears. The process itself becomes a way of reflecting the emotional complexities that thread through care, identity, and time.
What Softness Carries draws its name from the way nature holds complexity where softness does not mean weakness, but the strength to bend, shift, and begin again. It explores the quietly profound moments within transformation, the cycles of tending, holding, and surrendering that shape us, often without our noticing. These works don't seek answers, but hold space for what resists explanation, reflecting how nature moves and reshapes itself. Each piece invites pause, a place to rest inside ambiguity and feel change as it unfolds. This body of work is my way of staying with that uncertainty, letting nature guide me through it with gentleness and persistence. - Sara Pittman
Skyfalling Quietly, acrylic, oil, collage on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Pittman holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Huntingdon College, and since graduating in 2015, she has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions across the country. She is included in both private and corporate collections throughout North America and is represented by galleries in both the US and Canada. She currently paints full time out of her studio in Atlanta.