Sara Pope - Aphrodite

Sara Pope

Sara Pope is one of the UK's most prominent contemporary artists, celebrated for her ultra glossy, colourful, pop paintings of lips. Her work has garnered international attention, with a following that includes major brands, royalty, celebrities and global icons.

Drawing inspiration from a successful career in the fashion industry as a shoe designer as well as in magazines, as a designer and art director, Sara aims to capture the expression, sensuality, and beauty conveyed by the lips and mouth. By focusing on the most communicative of subjects, the mouth, Sara’s lip portraits bring a contemporary twist to the tradition of immortalisation through portraiture, uniquely capturing the personality and expression of each subject.

The starting point is a makeup brush, a lipstick and a camera. Sara paints her subjects’ lips, then, using specific techniques of makeup and lighting to highlight the three dimensionality of the mouth, she begins the process of capturing her subjects’ unique expression through an extensive photographic study. The shots provide the foundation from which Sara draws inspiration to start her painting. The painting process itself involves several layers of oil-diluted paint being overlaid, blending and smoothing the colours extensively at every stage, sometimes also mixing lipstick into the paint. Emulating the stylistic slickness of advertising, the result is glossy, perfect and irresistible.