ABOUT

ARTIST STATEMENT & ESSAY BY TOM MORTON

MY WORK has always been figurative, - an introverted exploration of experienced life and observations expressed through painting.
I follow my instincts when translating into paint what I subconsciously feel I want to communicate. I create ‘paint-objects’ that possess their own reality and physical presence and are intended to be experienced rather than read like a book.

When I begin a painting I have a sense, a mental image of what I want to arrive at, I then gather or produce the material to realise this image. I select moments, situations, faces, gestures that resonate with me,- those that feel significant and also generally representative. I don't reference history, literature, mythology, or similar sources, instead I turn inward to make the unseen visible.

My close focus on human vulnerability and emotion has made the figure a natural choice as the foundation for my work. The faces in my paintings aren't portrayals of individuals, they are chosen and borrowed for their specific qualities. Their likeness is obscured to make them symbolic and anonymous, rather than recognizable. I look for reflections of myself in people around me.
My choice of subjects has remained consistent throughout, whether working from imagination in the 1970s, or using purposely photographed, unaware strangers.,- I have at all times tried to capture emotionality combined with a sense of quiet positivity and inner strength, to create a duality that reflects both the negatives of reality and the hopefulness of resilience. I look for meaning and significance in the ordinary everyday. It is never about the individual person in my images or their activities and situations, but simply about their being, the humanness they represent.
With each painting I keep driving my process on to reach a stage, where the question, “who are these people? What is the story?” becomes irrelevant and it is purely about being immersed in the painting and the feeling that emanates from it.

From the outset, my ambition has been to create the greatest possible intensity in a painting, striving for what I have always admired in artists like Van Eyck and Vermeer, - reaching for something intangible and extraordinary while remaining very personal.

During the early 1970s, I practised the old master technique of layering egg tempera and oil. Eventually, I took this principle to the extreme by replacing the fragile egg tempera and oil with much tougher acrylic mediums, allowing me to go to much larger formats and with heavy impasto applications while essentially continuing the same method: building up countless layers of pure colour pigments mixed with various mediums to form a mostly translucent body of paint which sits object-like on the canvas. The surface appearance across a painting can vary greatly, this choice assigns different levels of importance and focus to individual parts of an image. Material thickness can range from nothing to 15mm, smooth or textured, and at times aggressively rough. The aim of this process is to create intense colour sensations and tonal ranges that cannot be achieved otherwise, but also evoking associations and adding new dimensions to an initially conventional image. Layers of material and colour become layers of perception,- I want the viewer to see into the painting, enter through the layers, and explore and analyse its various stages of evolution. The human image at the centre serves as the guide, material and colour are the interpretation, elaborating on the initial impression. I prefer the viewer to experience my work from a close distance, as if stepping into a painting and becoming absorbed by it. The large scale and close cropping of my figures is to create a greater intimacy.

Using a figurative language is offering a familiar code for understanding the materiality of my work. It is indispensable, along with colour and serves as the most expressive tool of my practice. While my paintings may superficially appear descriptive, they do not tell stories.
They are about the impression they leave with the viewer, combined with a meditative stillness, even when my colours are at their most challenging, They take a great deal of time to make and equally take time to explore

Where Time and Attention Thicken: Sara Rossberg’s Recent Paintings
By Tom Morton

Although the figures that populate Sara Rossberg’s recent canvases are often painted much larger than life-sized, they steadfastly refuse to inhabit their own monumentality. Going about their daily business, for the most part oblivious to the fact they are being observed, they do not dominate their environment, nor do they impose their mass upon us, as we stand outside their world, looking in. Rather, what they ask of us is intimacy, the paying of close, almost meditative attention to their deportment, their moods, and perhaps above all to their painted surfaces, which are at once so heavy with pigment and acrylic medium as to be almost sculptural, and so luminous that they appear to be fashioned not from matter, but from pure, condensed light. Unlike many artists who paint at this scale, Rossberg prefers her works to be experienced up close, our eyes inches from the canvas, so that they might absorb us into their atmosphere, their uncommon intensities.

Who are the individuals in these paintings? One answer is that they are 21st-century Londoners, some of the almost 9 million souls who dwell in the city, and know its signals and its noise, its irreconcilable contradictions. Another answer is anonymous faces in the crowd. Witness works such as Viridi-genta (2023), in which a procession of people walk by behind a low white railing, like travelers glimpsed at a terminal, or else protestors on a march. If this were a moving image, they would soon pass forever out of our minds. The artist, however, allows us to linger on their unconscious gestures, the subtle expressions that play across their faces — on their depthless, sacred, ultimately unknowable humanity. There is an argument, then, for describing Rossberg as what the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire termed a ‘painter of Modern life’, deeply attuned to the ‘fantastic reality’ of contemporary urban existence. And yet, while there is a strong sociological dimension to her work, it also pushes beyond the specifics of time and place, to examine what we might call the abiding mysteries of seeing and being.

In her painting There (2023-4), the artist depicts a young woman sitting on a flight of stone steps, taking a moment’s rest, or perhaps awaiting the arrival of a friend or lover. Cradled in her right hand is that ubiquitous contemporary object, a smart phone, although sheis gazing not at its screen, but off to her left, beyond the boundary of the image, at a place we cannot see — a place, indeed, that if it exists at all, only does so in our imagination. Maybe the person she’s waiting for has come into view, or maybe (considering the contemplative way she strokes her chin) she’s lost in the landscape of her own thoughts, another territory to which we have no visual access. On one level, There is a painting about how the act of looking separates our mind from our bodies, leaving us physically ‘here’, but transporting us mentally ‘there’ — something that occurs not only when we glance anxiously across a busy urban space, but also at the countless images we encounter in daily life. Rossberg’s inclusion of a smart phone in this work is, of course, more than mere set dressing. This technology, barely distinguishable from magic, offers us a portal to anywhere — any ‘there’ — but this comes with its costs. A phone screen is a flat plane, designed for frictionless viewing. Gaze into this black mirror too long, and we disappear. Contrastingly, as our eyes travel across Rossberg’s painting, they are slowed down by the varied topography of her surfaces, as though we were walking across an uneven forest floor, feeling leaves crunch and twigs snap beneath our feet. Her work is a space where time and attention thicken, where the fleeting moment takes on substance. Looking at There, we experience it as something like whole beings, present to ourselves in both body and mind.

More smart phones appear in the diptych Caput Mortuum (2023). One is drawn from a women’s handbag in the left panel, while in the right panel they are held aloft by members of a crowd, so that they might record some pictorially undisclosed event. Rossberg’s overall composition (which recalls that of Jacques-Louis David’s 1784-85 painting The Oath of the Horatii) is so formally integrated, so persuasive to the eye, that it takes a moment for us to realize that each half of the diptych represents a separate scene. Much of this sense of wholeness depends upon the artist’s colour palette of glowing ambers and inky blues, rose pinks and burnished golds, which — for all their infidelity to the world as we know it — are so adroitly balanced, and so suffused with sunshine, that they never feel synthetic, or out of place. Notably, the title of this work echoes the name of a purply-brown pigment, popular with Romantic-era painters such as Eugène Delacroix, which was originally made from mummified corpses (the Latin phrase ‘caput mortuum’ translates into English as ‘dead head’, and was also used in alchemy to refer to the supposedly useless residue left over from a chemical process). This hue undergirds the entire canvas, linking and muting its moreluminous colours, although we might also wonder if Rossberg’s title is intended to summon thoughts of the connection between paint and flesh, and of the value of that which cannot be easily assimilated, or put to obviously profitable use.

Rossberg is not a narrative painter (the consuming stillness of her works is at odds with storytelling), but she is a supreme sequencer of moods. Her canvas Atmosphere- Undefined (2025) depicts three figures, caught in three contrasting attitudes. In the foreground, we see a woman with downcast eyes, in the act of walking towards us, and out of the image. In the midground, another woman turns her face away from us, and makes an energetic gesture (a salutation, a threat?) with another ubiquitous 21st-century object, a portable water bottle. In the background, a shadowy, masculine figure hunches his shoulders, and stalks away. Several possible scenarios present themselves. The trio might be known to each other, or strangers. They might have just been involved in some heated altercation, or simply passed each other on the street, each caught up in their own thoughts, their own lonely reality. Rossberg is not going to give us the answers, and as we continue to scan the canvas, noting how the three figures dissolve into form, into colour, into pure paint, our need for narrative closure begins to fade away. Like many of the artist’s recent works, Atmosphere- Undefined encourages us to accustom ourselves to uncertainty, to absorb it into our embodied consciousness. When we do this, new ways of seeing — and of being — open up.

May 2025