Mountain Lake by Starlight
Sarah Winkler’s work is born in the artist’s experience in a landscape, soaking in the emotion of a place, and then removing herself from the physical landscape to reconstruct the place through a poetic rendering. Creating small sketches that become the source material for collage studies, Winkler then creates her large scale acrylic paintings, utilizing a variety of techniques to achieve a range of surface textures that mimic those of the different materials used in her collages. Places like Mount Rainier National Park and Medicine Bow National Forest are not depicted with exactness. Winkler is instead interested in creating distance between the actual place and the interpretation of it, allowing her work to exist in the abstract state between the physical world and our experience of it.