Sara Pope
Sara’s early commercial work, in fashion, beauty and media proved to be the inspiration for her art. Working in oils and acrylic, she makes use of bold, attractive colours with high shine gloss. Her painting style imitates the slickness of advertising, whilst provocatively subverting its themes.
Sara is best known for her seductive paintings of bold, colourful, voluptuous lips. She aims to capture the glamour and sexual power conveyed by a pair of lips. All her paintings from this series start with a photographic shoot, a model and some make up. Exploring the ideas of communication, she asks the model, to think of emotions, love, happiness or flirtation, which she captures photographically. The painting process for these Lip portraits involves several thin layers of oil, being overlaid over each other to create a translucent, glass like quality. Hyper realism has become a major theme in her lips painting.
Sara is also known for her portraits, most notably having a portrait of the Pope accepted into the Vatican collection. Sara works in series’ or ‘collections’, painting a body of work with common stylistic elements and colour palette, as with seasonal collections in fashion.
