Remixing the Blues Painting

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Sara P. Dias was born in Johannesburg in 1959. Taking on various jobs after high school, she meandered with few possessions from Gauteng to Tzaneen, then to Pretoria and back to Gauteng. After she attended the Boston House College AAA School of Advertising in 1988, she became a junior graphic designer and later an art director. Sara moved to Cape Town in late 1994 for another stint in advertising, after which she became a web designer. Sara experimented with oil and acrylics for years, but found her true medium in watercolour. Her first series of waterpaintings focused primarily on the lines that bind those afflicted with chronic diseases or mental trauma to the abiding joys of life. Such connections, she found, were best expressed in the unpredictability of watercolour. Representational art simply could not adequately express the ineffable agonies of the soul, and as a result Sara progressively moved away from realism to seek her bliss in abstraction. In her quest to depict the hidden stresses of life, Sara explores the elastic tension between pause and continuation, infiltration and push-back, and resilience and capitulation. She expresses the essence of this constant tension through the flow and stop of various mediums. Layering vivid colours, she punctuates soft washes with hard bounding lines to articulate a disquiet with the forces that push and pull at us. Her vision has since broadened from watercolour to additional mediums, but her focus on depicting life's unseen stresses through abstraction remains unchanged. Sara takes a close interest in the work of international contemporary artists who use art mediums in unconventional ways. Sara is inspired by the energetic and lyrical depictions of nature by John Henry Olsen. The masterful abstractions of Chu Teh-Chun and Zao Wou-Ki guide her, and Helen Frankenthaler remains an enduring fascination. Sara is a member of Watercolor Art Southern Africa (WASA), which holds regular exhibitions nationally. Sara is a published haiku poet. She lives in Durbanville, Cape Town, with her life-partner and four cats. --- .artist