Last January Margie Sarrao sold her first painting at the Four Seasons Show at the Fuller Lodge. It was a small painting of pretty pink hollyhocks in front of an adobe building. “It was pretty and springy. She (the buyer) told me it made her happy.”
“I want to create art that people will want to put in their home,” said Sarrao. “Most people would want to look at things that are pretty.”
Although Sarrao doesn’t see herself as a cutting edge artist, she is determined to find her own artistic voice. Her inventive spirit and rebellious nature is leading the way.
“When you start to take a class you want to do what the instructor says. Instructors have a style, and they think it’s the right style, but with art you need to start to develop your own style.”
In high school she was in a group that got together at a woman’s house to do still life paintings. She said, “It was very classic. Very realistic. I was already rebelling.”
She was working on a painting of a vase of flowers and fell in love with the colors mid-process, and decided she wanted to keep it that way (it’s hanging in her dining room). “The woman teaching the class said, ‘this painting’s not finished.’ But I really liked it and put my foot down.”
She said, “My mom and dad were dead set against me being an artist. They wanted me to sustain myself financially, so I ended up going into teaching.”
She put her art aside for many years, but five years ago she decided to get back into it and has disciplined herself to take classes at the Art Center.
She started out doing more still life paintings, but (like most of the artists that I’ve interviewed) her artistic life changed when she found a material that she loved to work with – a palette knife. She said, “I just took to it. It’s so textural. With the palette knife you smear paint on. If you don’t like it you scoop it off.”
People have told Sarrao that you just can’t paint portraits with the palette knife. It doesn’t work. But she is determined to find a way to make it work.
“I’ve seen people who do portraits with palette knives online,” she said. She met a woman who does who calls them “gestures.”
“It could go badly at first,” she admits, but is excited to use the broad textured strokes of the palette knife to paint things like children in the distance, so that you can see that it’s a child in a snowsuit, or portraits of people with interesting faces.
