ARTIST: SABRINA ARMITAGE

Pacific Coast Gallery is honored to represent Sabrina Armitage. Sabrina lives and works in Los Angeles, and her layered, textural multidimensional artwork is influenced by her education in psychology and her previous professional experience as a social worker where she worked to unfold the human layers that reveal the inner psyche.

Sabrina was born in Vienna to Czech parents. Her family moved to New Orleans when she was one. From an early age she had a passion for sketching the world around her. Being surrounded by the historic homes of New Orleans and the architecture of the European cities where she spent her childhood summers, she became drawn to the effect time had on the texture of wood and iron, and the ways in which the layers would unfold to reveal the history of a building. These textures and layers would represent a significant theme in her mixed media art years later.

After studying architecture, Sabrina’s curiosity shifted from understanding structural framework to exploring the framework of the human psyche. With degrees in psychology and social work, Sabrina began a formative career in clinical social work, drawn to working with children and families, helping to unfold the human layers that reveal the inner landscape.

In 2012 Sabrina fully entered into the world of encaustic painting. The rich colors of the French Quarter and its historical layers continue to impact Sabrina while her summers in Wyoming inspire raw natural paintings and a vision of wide open spaces. Themes of resilience and adaptability weave through many of Sabrina's pieces, reflecting both her background in the human psyche and her parents’ escape from a war torn occupied country. Sabrina’s multidimensional work illustrates struggle and yearning, the translation of humanity's foibles and the layers that can be peeled back, revealing the internal landscape. Her ever-evolving layered medium of encaustics encompasses the truth of nature in its specific natural form and evokes possibility and resilience as the human threads that course through both life and art.

My curiosity in connecting to the layers that create something or someone and in the resilience and adaptability of the human spirit and nature, has led me to an investigative excavation of the transformative power of vulnerability and struggle. There is a quiet reverence in being allowed to be a witness to the discovery process, to scraping beneath the surface. I use my art to further this search, giving visual meaning to an idea, memory, or emotion. This becomes a journey in which layers of self are uncovered, reinterpreted and expressed. Ultimately my art becomes a vehicle through which internal dialogue and external communication intersect.

My preferred medium is encaustics -- pigmented beeswax and resin -- as it is dimensional, tactile and forgiving. In working with encaustic wax there is a component of control over the medium and a component of allowing the wax to have its own flow. A balance exists between having an intention, a plan, and shifting with the wax toward an unexpected outcome. This echoes the beautiful, rich struggle of being alive. Encaustics allows me another language that reflects and parallels not only the artistic process but that of each of our human stories. The wax both creates and reveals its own story or history through its layers which can remain visible or be obscured. The simultaneous building up and stripping down of the wax layers hints at the complexity of our sometimes messy imperfect existence. The scrapes, scratches, drips and incisions are all a reflection of the beauty held within the natural world and within human imperfection, vulnerability and struggle.

Sabrina Armitage

Los Angeles, 2020