February 9, 2022

The Joy of Flowers with Sarah Gillard

Do you love flowers? Do you love colour? Love Art? Of course you do!

We are so delighted to welcome artist Sarah Gillard to Pegasus Art for her ART TALK ‘The Joy of Flowers’ on 23rd April 2022. Join us for a relaxed and enjoyable few hours sharing Sarah’s love for flowers, colours and painting, alongside her experience working in the Liberty of London Design Studio.

Her talk will be illustrated by a slideshow of paintings, classic Liberty designs and the ‘Colour Bible’ she used when producing multiple new colourways whilst working at the studio. Sarah will also be giving us a colour mixing demonstration using her favourite medium, gouache, and her much loved Saunders Waterford paper. Paper makers since the 1700’s, St. Cuthbert’s Mill have kindly sponsored this Art Talk. She will talk about the materials and techniques she learnt and still uses in her work today, particularly colour combinations and bold palettes.

Liberty Design Studio

As a fashion textiles graduate, Sarah’s first commission was a rug for The Conran Shop, quickly followed by a four year stint in the Liberty Design Studio. Through this experience she discovered gouache, the preferred medium for mixing and presenting vibrant colours for multiple colourways.

Connected to Liberty’s flagship building by a wooden bridge, the unique in-house studio is occupied by over a dozen highly skilled artists who conceptualise, rework and hand-draw artworks to create hundreds of new fabric designs every year.

Her experience of colour mixing at Liberty’s has shaped and influenced her entire career since. Combined with her love of flowers, she has never looked back. Sarah paints astonishingly vibrant artworks, landscapes, still life and floral paintings which have been exhibited worldwide including the RWA, Bath Society of Artists and the Thelma Hubert Gallery. Her first exhibition was at the Lyric Theatre in London in 1993.

Plein air inspiration

From 2000 Sarah spent five years living in the Netherlands, surrounded by tulips. It was an irresistible landscape for a plein air painter which deepened her love for colour. It is easy to see where Sarah draws her inspiration. The sunshine in her work is almost tangible and her application of paint to achieve the delicacy of each flower is breath-taking.

Her method of painting is energetic and spontaneous, qualities that mirror her personality. She has a passion for nature that has taken her from the herbaceous borders of an English cottage garden to the rolling hills of Tuscany.