We recently connected with Sara Fair and have shared our conversation below.
Sara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?
I always wanted an art career sooner but needed to have it later since I didn’t have the discipline or understanding of what it meant to run a business.
Like many people, my art career has taken many turns and a backseat while raising a family (with her supportive husband) to juggling a career full time outside the arts. Before 2010, I was able to paint full time but did not understand anything about business. For the past twelve years (2011-July, 2023), I had a full-time professional career but “kept one leg in the arts.” While working, I have always had a workshop lined up as a vacation and when zoom classes became a thing, I enrolled in them as well. On Sunday afternoons, I watched art videos and have taught classes locally, nationally, and internationally along the way. I have done anything and everything I could to stay on top of my studies in art as I just do not feel complete without it.
While working, I began to see that art and creativity helped my work and work helped me learn business that could be applied to art! I learned so much that I never knew when I had the opportunity to paint full time. I am now retired from my “other” job and am blessed to say I am a full-time artist! The moral for me was to have the right attitude, try to always be doing something creative no matter how small or in what form and, most importantly, enjoy the journey as all things can inform each other.
Sara, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
About the Artist.
Artist Statement
I strive to express what I am seeing with an honesty to nature and an emotional response to the subject. …….
I guess this is why I love the impressionists, they were such students of nature and with a few brilliant strokes they said so much with so little. It is so challenging to try and capture the beauty that God has surrounded us with. This challenge seems impossible and keeps me striving to make these simple tools say what my heart wants to say. Creating art gives so much joy. It makes us view our surroundings with great consciousness and the more our lives are lived with great consciousness the richer our art , our life and our surroundings become.
I love these quotes:
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Hans Hoffman.
About the Artist.
Artist Statement
I strive to express what I am seeing with an honesty to nature and an emotional response to the subject. …….
I guess this is why I love the impressionists; they were such students of nature and with a few brilliant strokes they said so much with so little. It is so challenging to try and capture the beauty that God has surrounded us with. This challenge seems impossible and keeps me striving to make these simple tools say what my heart wants to say. Creating art gives so much joy. It makes us view our surroundings with great consciousness and the more our lives are lived with great consciousness the richer our art, our life, and our surroundings become.
I love these quotes:
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Hans Hoffman.
“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Color is my day long obsession, joy, and torment.” Claude Monet
Artistic Training
I have been painting since 2003. My background in the sciences, with a Ph.D. in optics, reveals my love for the study of nature and allows me to have a technical as well as artistic understanding of light and color. I have taught multiple classes around the country and in Europe and have exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the Southeast. I love to paint plein air as nature is my best teacher. I have been fortunate to participate in a few plein air events including the Forgotten Coast Plein Air Invitational and Art in the Open in Ireland.
My artistic training has come from independent studies of the masters, plein air painting, along with tutelage from contemporary masters. I spent three years studying with Murat Kaboulov, a Russian impressionist, along with several students of the great Russian artist Sergei Bongart. My style reflects my love for the Russian impressionists use of color and large brushwork. I have also studied extensively with Ned Mueller, Huihan Liu, and Guido Frick.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
“I believe since we are created in God’s image we all are imparted with a gift and desire for creativity. It is hard with modern life and responsibilities to honor that gift. However, we must all try to recognize it and use it in whatever way we can albeit however small. To feel complete as a child of God, we must exercise our gifts of creativity along with spiritual, physical and mental.”
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Personally, I know the importance of art to create a well-rounded individual, confident, and capable of creatively solving problems in the sciences as well as enhancing the ability to work well with people. I have a PhD. in engineering, I have worked for NASA as well as the biomedical industry. Many question my leap from sciences to the arts; however, most don’t know that it was never a leap for me. I grew up in a house with a technical father who, besides my mother, was one of the most creative person I have ever known. Art was just something we always did and I thought everyone else just made things all the time as well.
The gift of art to a child is not just a talent realized; it is a lifelong skill that can be used in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, in our society in the past 100 years, arts and the sciences has been separated. It was never that way in the past, think of the Renaissance and Leonardo Da Vinci. He was a mathematician, an architect, a sculptor, and a painter. It is important for their future, that children have the opportunity to be exposed to the arts.
The encouragement of an individual to know they can create, with a habit of regularly creating combined with a love and study of nature in light of God’s creative ability and creation is the key for a thriving society anywhere
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sarabethfair.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sara.fair/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarabethfair