sara macculloch

And Those Were Days of Roses
March 20th - April 19th, 2025

This body of work is a series of paintings about moments in places that I love, stretching from the early 1990s to the present.

They are from beach trips with friends from when I first had access to a car, summers spent in the Hebrides between years at art college, times spent with my daughter at the cottage I rent in Nova Scotia (spanning toddlerhood to adulthood), visits to family cottages in Ontario and Quebec, an island on Georgian Bay, and several art residencies in Maine.

Though most of these paintings have no figures, they are not solitary. People were with me in each place—behind the lens of the camera, looking at what I was looking at, and with me in spirit in the studio as I painted them. They are almost as much about my relationships with those people as they are about the landscapes you see.

They are a homage or a remembrance of those times, an attempt to make the ineffable into something solid.

The titles of the paintings are taken from the dates they happened.

There was no overarching plan for this series. I arrived at the studio each day, sifted through boxes of photographs and sketchbooks until I came across something that would spark a strong memory or reaction in me, and then felt compelled to try to paint it. Some did not work, and others came together very quickly.

The scale of each piece was chosen intuitively. Some moments felt expansive, while others seemed to call for more intimacy. With the exception of one or two, each painting was made in one session in the studio—this was to capture the immediacy of not only the subject in that moment in time but the clarity of how I felt about it that day. Using very wet paint, I worked just until the point where it captured the place. If the painting didn’t resolve in that session, I would wipe the entire surface off and start over the following day. I need the paintings to retain an aliveness that can really only be achieved by doing it all at once, while all the paint is fluid.

My hope is that the finished works not only capture the look and the feeling of being there but might connect viewers with their own memories of place.