Dark and mysterious

Sarah Dolby takes a break from working on The Collector of Worries, one of six paintings and four...
Sarah Dolby takes a break from working on The Collector of Worries, one of six paintings and four drawings that she will exhibit in Auckland next month. Photos by Gregor Richardson
Sophia's Lament
Sophia's Lament
The White Rabbit
The White Rabbit
The Ring Master
The Ring Master

Strong, feminine women in life, literature and film fuel Sarah Dolby's imagination. The Otago Peninsula artist talks to Kim Dungey.

Sarah Dolby is a bright, bubbly woman who paints dark, brooding images. Her subjects include famous literary figures, such as Ophelia, and fairy-tale archetypes, such as wicked witches and fairy godmothers.

The 44-year-old was one of several artists opening their studios to the public as part of a city and peninsula art trail on Saturday.

Those entering her sunny workspace (next to the kitchen where she has this week baked a Minecraft-themed cake for her son's 7th birthday) are in for a surprise.

Her work is not traditional portraiture. Beautiful but haunting, her characters have flushed cheeks, elongated necks and heavy shadows under their eyes and they stare out at the viewer in a way that makes some people uneasy.

Dolby says she tries to capture the mix of strength and fragility in people, and the middle ground between how they present themselves and who they really are.

''Each painting or body of work represents a very specific time in my own life and certain characters tend to resonate with me during these times. Sometimes it's their strength and grace, their vulnerability or their wickedness.''

Although the subjects are often literary characters and she uses real people as models, Dolby creates her own stories for them and surrounds them with symbols to support the narrative. Witches and princesses figured when she was reading fairy tales to her son, Benji.

Life, death and religion were explored when husband Richard Egan did a PhD on spirituality and the end-of-life care of cancer patients.

The former Bayfield High School pupil has been interested in art for as long as she can remember.

In primary school, she traded her drawings for Smurf toys and in her 20s, she carried beaten-up notebooks through Indonesia, Morocco and Europe, filling them with sketches and portraits.

After graduating from art school, she began working at Animation Research and was creative director there when she resigned in 2012 to work as a full-time artist.

Next month, she will have a solo show at Orex Gallery in Auckland and soon after she will fly to Los Angeles, where she will exhibit in a group show at the Corey Helford Gallery.

Dolby is keen to participate in the international art scene and to gain ideas for future projects, her excitement undiminished by news that her oil painting ended up in Utah: ''It was a bit stressful but it finally got to where it was supposed to be going,'' she says, laughing.

The detailed paintings each take two to three months to complete so every weekday and most nights, too, she can be found in her Macandrew Bay studio, listening to audio books while she works.

''It switches off the [internal] chatter; what to make for dinner, things like that,'' she explains, ''and it feeds the imagery.''

Recently, John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has evoked mental pictures of magical, overgrown surroundings but for much of the time, she need look no further than her home town for inspiration.

Sometimes she drives around the city's north end just to soak up the atmosphere, she says.

There's something ''quite creepy'' about old houses with their flaking paint and torn terylene curtains.

And she likes that.

''I really love the Victorian Gothic era: it's dark, beautiful and mysterious.''

 


 

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