Adventure Journal
Painting the Next Chapter
Issue 13, 2019
2019 NATJA Gold Award: Lifestyle, Personality, Profiles
Sarah Uhl’s home studio is surprisingly neat. Her desk is tidy and orderly, in stark contrast to her latest inspiration, mixed-media collages she makes by cutting up half-finished paintings, removing the sky she didn’t like or a part that got too busy or dark, and returning to the roots of her creative process: making something with her hands that speaks to her, just for herself. She describes the method as weeks of “rearranging paper shards in new orientations that blend different landscape elements into one picture, much like our memories and our love of the land is a blend of all the places we’ve been and felt fondly for.”
“Golden Hour” is her favorite piece to emerge from this process of destruction and reconstruction. Upon a bright yellow sky, Uhl stippled orange-ochre squares. Over that she layered a calm sea of turquoise and azurite blue, then a range of jagged mountains rising in sharp undulations on the right side of the collage. The colors of the sun, squares, and sea resonate on the ridges and valleys of the mountains. In the foreground, a river flows wild and free in the same colors as the sea.
