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We were very pleased to hold an exhibition of Sara Philpott's new work. Sara is a painter-printmaker who enjoys moving from one media to the other to create amazing images in response to external and emotional stimuli. She has established herself as one of the foremost and most exciting artists now working in Wales. Her exhibition here was very popular attracting plenty of interest.

Having already developed a reputation in London in the 1980's she moved to Wales where the landscape had a profound effect upon her. Her response to it led to a new phase of neo-Romantic painting. After the birth of her two children, she worked on a series of paintings celebrating the mysteries of motherhood and creation. The series of 12 paintings for a calendar are amongst the best work of this period. Refusing to be type cast, she always likes to move on to a new theme or technique. The images for two books, "Lens of Crystal" and "Poems of Light", published in 1996 and 2002 are exceptional. If she wished, she could continue with this quality of work and develop a distinguished international reputation. The combination of artistic and intellectual quality is very rare. As she has matured, her work has acquired a more complex and deeper significance. Like many artists she uses her medium to explore the human condition as she experiences it. In her earlier work, she hid herself in delicately accurate watercolours of unchallenging images or in the re-working of traditional myths of fables. Now she has the courage to face the joys and disappointments that we all know in our day to day lives. Her work has not become formulaic. Her fierce independence and determination to follow her own creativity rather than fashion or profit has echoes with many of the great artists of the past.

Those discriminating collectors who flocked to her exhibitions in Hampstead remain the best ambassadors of her art.

We are lucky to get Sara's lovely work here at Meadowbank. It is a show of her recent work "exploring the resonances of the spirit...part of everything is a part of everything else...described in the visual imagery of the landscape there are absent ghosts, points of reference that reveal the sense of place as somewhere in which we measure our extent of feeling 'at home'...". Most of the work comprises oil paintings built up in many layers with thin glazes and monotypes which are overprinted several times.

We are sure that everyone will enjoy what they find in this exhibition. The preview days were well attended and all agreed the exhibition is an excellent opportunity to purchase the work of this very important comtemporary artist.

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Her pictures are not literal or merely topographical, they are a poetic evocation of the changing seasons, and depict the shifting patterns made by the sun, wind and rain on the landscape. Over the years this direct experience has become internalised and the colour and shapes transformed into a kind of personal formal language,so that her work has become more abstract while still reflecting the wild beauty of the Welsh landscape"

Dr Pauline Madge
Jan 2004