Sarah Innes is a student of life. She was born and raised in Ann Arbor, MI, where she currently lives and works. She earned her MFA at the University of Michigan, and taught there for several years. I first knew her when I was a student at the U of M School of Art and Design, where I was lucky enough to have her as a teacher. What I know of drawing now I credit to her. I asked to interview her partly because she deserves to be better known, and I want to do whatever I can in that capacity, and partly because I really wanted to know more about her art, which is a breath of fresh, unaffected air in a discipline that sometimes seems conceptualized and layered and cross-referenced to death. That discipline is painting, and a good word to describe Sarah’s paintings is “breath.” They breathe and shimmer. They shift, they dance. They are straightforward and dazzling. They know what they are, which is an ongoing and unfolding meditation on life.

I asked Sarah what drew her, as a child, to making art. She described growing up in a pretty boring ranch-style house that held two things of interest: a set of encyclopedias and a collection of paintings. Her parents had some reproductions of works of Ben Shahn, Lautrec and Feininger, and also some abstract paintings by U of M students. Early in the morning, Sarah and her brother would look things up in the encyclopedias. She particularly recalls the entries under “P”, where “Painters” appeared near “Pompeii.” The history of painting and the casts of people, dogs, objects mummified in lava. Her paintings now depict some forms that seem cast, contoured, in a similar way.

Sarah drew constantly from an early age on any surface available. Walls, the dresser in her room, the dock at her grandparent’s cabin, where she noticed that her lines flowed and smudged much more beautifully on wet wood. Her grandmother had her paint flowers on pieces of wood furniture. Her grandfather, an orthopedic surgeon, would take her fishing. She describes his hands, “Beautiful and skilled…He would gut fishes very elegantly.” The way he drew the knife across the fish impressed Sarah as “…Almost like being a draughtsman. I think there was a relationship between what he did and drawing.” One line cut and you could see everything about the fish, what it had eaten, whether it was male or female. Sarah took this skill of her grandfather’s and applied it to the drawing of “ladies,” her first subject, and one still present in her work. Why ladies? Fascination, and the desire to understand them. “It was just women,” Sarah recalls, “What was up with these women in my family? Once I asked my mother how babies came out. She said they came out of a door in your stomach. Well, I didn’t have a door in my stomach!” Figuring out women’s physiology was a clue to deciphering their psychology. This focus on the personal gesture, the revealing stance, is one of the best things about Sarah’s art. Her figure paintings have an immediacy that feels almost photographic, though they are the result of many hours of work, tweaking the gesture this way and that. Sarah’s sense for what’s right in each body is uncanny. She studied psychology for a time but gave it up. “Statistics was my Waterloo,” she says. She tried art therapy instead, enrolling in the program at NYU, but remained dissatisfied. “They weren’t serious enough about painting.” Instead of studying art therapy, Sarah taught at a few private schools in New York and painted, often choosing for subjects people she didn’t know, whose gestures would catch her eye. She married a long-time friend, a photographer, who shared her interest in image-making and psychoanalysis. Then, “He fell ill, he had cancer. We came back to Ann Arbor for the summer, so he could be treated at U of M.” He died that autumn.

Sarah, a widow at 31, spent a while after her husband’s death painting and traveling. She recalls the beauty of Diego Rivera’s murals in The Palace of Cortes in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The whole world suddenly seemed, for her, alive with signs and messages. “Everything took on so much meaning. It was incredible.” Returning to Michigan, She worked at The Henry Ford Museum’s Works on Paper Collection, where she encountered the work of early American portrait painters and silhouette cutters. As a professor she would have her drawing students cut silhouettes of the models from their paper, and she began to do so in her own studio practice. Sarah’s silhouettes function as stencils, which she places on the surface of her paintings and paints over. They lend her work an interesting graphic quality in places, and also help when she’s struggling to get a gesture right. Sometimes the drawing or original painting is visible beneath the stenciled bit, causing the whole to vibrate in different dimensions. “It’s nice to work with that disjuncture between the shape and the line,” she says. And the process of cutting the stencil takes her back to her grandfather skillfully opening the fish. For Sarah, the line, drawn or cut, is the first step in unlocking the secret of what the subject truly is. The stencil also adds an element of surprise, since she’s never sure quite how they will work in each painting. “That’s what I like about stencils- I’m always surprised. Not always happily- the best is happily. But I’m always surprised.”
I wonder how having children has changed her practice. Sarah is re-married, and has two. “It takes up a lot of head-space,” she says, “…I love to draw them. And it’s also a way of getting away from them- gives you something else to do. Having kids involves a lot of tedium. A lot of time just sitting there. And if you can draw, you can do that while you’re sitting there.”

I ask what artists she’s currently looking at. She mentions Goya and Velazquez (she makes fascinating maquettes of “Las Meninas” which can be seen all around her studio) Vermeer, Diebenkorn, Park, Matisse. What is her opinion of the current state of painting? “People don’t put in time the way they used to,” she responds after thinking about it. “Right now there aren’t any Morandis out there, painting the same thing over and over again. People want fast resolutions.”
Sarah Innes’ recent paintings will be on display at Café Zola in Ann Arbor from Nov. 9 through Jan. 8.