Biography

LOOK UP

Joy and euphoria are the feelings which Sarah Waghorn experiences when a familiar tree is at its flowering peak. On daily walks around her neighbourhood she knows where to look up and when to witness these events, serving to fill her heart with promise and hope. The trials and tribulations of the state of the world momentarily melt away. It is an optimistic visual feast in which she has honed her subject from 4 years of painting flowering trees, narrowing the selection down to just two iconic natives: The Banksia and the Flowering Gum.

Large scale forms are the key to the dynamism of her paintings and the expressive mark making in her richly textured brushstrokes that add to their movement.

She has been a recent finalist in The Muswellbrook, Calleen, Waverley and National Capital Art prizes, and shown in a number of group shows in regional NSW and Melbourne.

Sarah Waghorn’s work explores gardens and interiors. 

She celebrates the way humans have imprinted their individual character upon the landscape through their horticulture and in their interiors through a display of collected fabric, furniture and colour.
In portraying the clutter and complexity of a busy scene in both the larger close up florals and the interiors, details of these forms are played out in her use of colour and brushstrokes
She mostly paints in oils. Often her ideas are conceived in gouache first and then transposed into an oil painting. Some of these gouache paintings are beginning to take on a life of their own.
’I am not a realist painter but more of a figurative modern impressionist - I strive for a more whimsical narrative and try to convey the delight I personally feel at the image I have set out to portray.’