About Sara Crow

(From an interview for the Hutchinson News by Jennifer Randall)

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Were you always considered, by yourself or others, a creative person?

Depends on the others, I suppose. I mean, we had this special program in my elementary school called OM (Odyssey of the Mind), which was basically was like debate for creative problem solving. And I wasn’t considered “creative” enough for that.

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Honest, I’m not still bitter about that, uh, a quarter of a century later. Nope. My mom’s probably more jaded about it than I am. Mentioning that teacher can still send her into a tirade.

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But other than good ‘ol Mr. Levine, most people considered me to be creative throughout my childhood, especially in areas of visual and literary arts. I also pretended I was a musician until I went to college for it and got the first D of my life in Music Theory. Then I screwed my head on straight and went to school for English. I’d rather write a twenty-page research paper any day than be tasked with writing a three-minute song in an odd key and time signature while avoiding parallel fifths (ah, my old nemesis…). So yes, almost every career path I imagined for myself from the earliest days of my childhood were somewhere in the creative realm.
 

And I really could never imagine myself in an office job. I think the years I spent doing them are getting shaved off my time in purgatory or whatever equivalent really exists. My brain just isn’t wired for most of that work unless there’s a creative thread running through it.

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How did you journey into the style you have today?

My journey into this style is a long story that I could probably at least trace back to the month I spent in an intensive watercolor course over the summer after my fifth grade year. Fifth grade had sucked a great big stinky, stale cigar, and this class was pretty much the bright spot in my year. Learning when to take and when to give up control and how to lay color on to create intensity and impact, understanding how it lives and moves on the page and geeking out over papers and brushes and the colorfastness of this paint over that are, honestly, a big part of what got me through the no-man’s land of middle school. I still prefer watercolors to any other painted medium.

The photography bug stretches back even further than that, actually. I was begging to be behind the camera almost as long as I can remember, and I’ve always had an eye for it. When I finally picked up the camera, you couldn’t get me away from it. Marrying photography into the twist and curl of my style was really natural, and I probably have the avant garde artists like Hannah Hoch to thank for the idea somewhere back there in my brain of collaging the two styles together.

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My current drawing style has evolved even since I started using it. It was, at first, very stylistic, mimicking some of my influences, but in time, I’ve started also incorporating more realistic flowers and vines, inspired more directly by my love of nature. And I’ve begun working back in my own illustration again, which is nice, because it’s been so long since I really worked with real figural drawing.

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What do you consider your biggest influences as far as subject matter and then as far as other artists?

As far as style goes, I’d have to say my biggest influences come from Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Kehinde Wiley, Van Gogh, and ancient and folk arts. I’m constantly mesmerized especially by the intricate work of Islamic, Egyptian, Medieval, Scandinavian, and Indian artists who made the mundane into sacred spaces with a twist of wood or clay or the turn of a brush (which is something I aim for in my own work, in a way). Street artists are, in some ways, their inheritors. The best street art both surprises, delights, and says something to you all at once and turns someplace unexpected into something profound. I’d love to be able to say my work achieves that.  
 

And as far as subject, I owe a lot to my love of the minute world, where I found so much joy in the twist of the first frost of fall on the windows and the curl of a vine as it begs to meld and then to dominate a surface. I could also probably even go as far as to credit my exposure to comics and the way that the best artists manage the space of a panel, or the spread of panels on a page. Some of the best panels in comic history are literally etched into our cultural consciousness, and their composition isn’t simply lucky. Captain America’s famous slugging of Hitler is powerful because of foreshortening, perspective, and a very conscious composition that makes the viewer feel and cheer as the oppressor is dethroned.

I’ve always loved the experiments with rich color and space that some artists make (Gaugin and Goya come to mind first), and how they expertly draw the eye around and manipulate emotions. Stand in front of Thomas Hart Benton’s “Persepone” at the Nelson-Atkins and tell me it doesn’t make you feel something in what could, in less talented hands, be a relatively mundane figure study.  

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You use a lot of design elements that have a certain organic feel to them, can you describe this more?

For a while, I thought that my style was mostly inspired by the henna artists of India that still work today, making women something almost ethereal on their wedding days as walking works of art. But then I went back home, to my earliest influences, and saw familiar motifs from my work in the rosemaling I had wanted to take up in middle school and the Egyptian friezes, the deco stylings of the period rooms, and Hokusai prints that captivated me at the Mia. Those are all still in my artistic DNA, I think, as is the appreciation of nature’s own handiwork.

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What would you like the viewer to take from seeing your artwork? Are you trying to relay a message?

There are messages that I hope come through in different pieces, but overall, I think I want what every artist wants from their work; I want people to see what I see when I stand in awe of the way that nature transcends our desires to “improve” it. I’d like to encourage people to slow down, just a little bit, and see what’s sublime and beautiful in the world they walk through every day. The soul inherent in every little piece of this magnificent world of ours lives in every sparkling dust mote hanging in a sunbeam and in every blade of grass. We just need to give ourselves the opportunity to see it.