Sarah Graham

In her majestic drawings, London-based artist Sarah Graham (born 1973) observes the plant and insect world in close-up, through the prism of a naturalist and a traveler. Graham has been drawing and painting full-time for more than a decade now, making images informed by her knowledge of the unfamiliar and faraway. Her studies of the natural world have the complexity and detail of a Leonardo drawing: rhizomes, bulbs and vividly chromatic large-petaled tropical flowers, visited by the insect and butterfly specimens that she borrows from the Entomology Department of the Natural History Museum, London. She is inspired by the graphic plant imagery of German photographer Karl Blossfeldt, and particularly by the spiky biomorphism of Graham Sutherland’s works, which feed her sculptural interpretations in charcoal and graphite. Sutherland is her lodestar, first encountered at Saltwood Castle, home to her godmother Jane Clark and the late Sir Kenneth Clark’s superb collection of British modernist painting.