Sarah Blagg has always remained focused on visual art. Her first paid jobs were commercial assignments: sign painting, murals, and ad illustrations. Long known in Fort Worth as Sarah Green, she went on to work extensively in watercolor, photography, printmaking, and her current medium of digital painting on an iMac computer. She uses Adobe Illustrator software to create her digital paintings, which are funny, fierce, and almost kinetic, with pools and streams of liquid color.

 

She doesn’t work with filters or manipulate original images. Instead, she snaps casual photos of her subjects for inspiration and draws their faces by hand, using a magic mouse. And although the legendary David Hockney has since come out as a fan of making art on his iPad, the transition to the new technology wasn’t easy at first for Blagg. “I grappled with this as a legitimate art form,” she said. “I’m old enough to have worked in very traditional mediums for much of my life. I thought, ‘This is too easy. I’m not having to crank the prints through the press myself.’ But I’ve always worked intensely in very short spurts, so this works very well for me.”

 

Sarah’s unashamed to cite commercial art as an influence throughout her career. “It’s very difficult to make a living as an artist unless you do commercial work,” she says. “Every artist I know has had to do it at some point during their career.”​ Although she doesn’t consider Andy Warhol a primary influence –– Toulouse-Lautrec, Goya, and Rembrandt are among her personal gods –– she loves the “commercial gloss” of Warhol’s famous prints and the confidence and clarity of their images. “I don’t think Warhol necessarily captured the personality of his subjects, but he understood how strong our obsession with image was,” Blagg says. “That’s why his work is so beautiful to look at.”​

 

Jimmy Fowler