Sarah Jane Knight - Fine Art

There are some days that just have a feel or a presence.  We all have different memories of how the days of our youth felt, or even still feel.  Even as adults there are times or days that have a particular colour or tone that sum up how that day makes you feel. 

Mondays can seem to be filled with a sense of something undone, as a child usually homework, and oft remembered as dark, cold and rainy.  Saturdays may feel like sunshine filled freedom, whatever the weather. 

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As John Steinbeck suggested in his classic American novel Sweet Thursday:  “you fix the day and hour by some incident that happened to yourself”. However, as Steinbeck so eloquently described some days just seem to have a universal measure: 

• The bad days, those Lousy Wednesdays which “are born ugly. From the very first light they are no damn good whatever the weather”.  “On such a day people resist getting out of bed and set their heels against the day,,, it is impossible to make a good cup of coffee, shoestrings break, cups leap from shelves …and shatter on the floor”;

• That Sweet Thursday when “the air is washed and polished like a lens” and the “sunshine has a goldy look and red geraniums burned the air around them”.  The sort of day when “Little kids are likely to give off tin-whistle screams for no reason, and businessmen find it necessary to take a drive to look at a piece of property.  Old people sit looking off into the distance and remember inaccurately that the days of their youth were all like that”; orThe Waiting Friday which “nearly everyone agrees …is a waiting day.  In business, the week is really over.  In school, Friday is the half-open gate to freedom.  Friday is neither a holiday nor a workday, but a time of wondering what Saturday will bring”

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This exhibition brings together three very different artists  - Neda Dana-Heari, Sarah Knight and Virginia Waterhouse - with one aim in mind: to explore how they can interpret those days, described so richly in Steinbeck’s prose, through their own particular art practice.  Whether that is through the expression of colour, tone, imagery or shape.

 

Sarah's paintings, prints and installations explore the overlooked and discarded in the places around us, making us look anew at familiar spaces and exposing the fragility of human endeavour when faced with the power of time and nature.  For this exhibition she has taken the descriptive prose and the sense of colour used by Steinbeck to create an imagined place, populated by imagined people, living their lousy, sweet or waiting days.