Sarah's endless energy, creativity, and giggling is contagious and her dedication to her work and the latino community makes you want to do so much more with your life. her magical paintings/dioramas are nostalgic, intimate portraits of private and public spaces. although she offers us a particular view of a space, we are always invited to imagine the personal histories and relationships built in/with/around each one. if david hockney and grandma moses ever collaborated, it might look something like this.-Rebecca Goldschmidt, 5/24/2010 Big Things Ahead Sarah Dougherty paints rooms. She paints rooms so often that in some sort of a simplistic swoop she chose to title her URL RoomPortraits.com. Of course artists have long painted reality, though today’s young aesthetic creators have largely abandoned traditional still life and landscape painting in favor of fantasy, abstraction, and iconography. Leave it to photographers to take snaps of rooms. It seems rare, almost humbling, for any artist to choose such an old school theme as a primary outlet for exploration, but Dougherty manages to breathe new life into the subject matter of living space. With an undeniable Latino flair due to her time spent in Mexico City, her paintings rely heavily on the use of pastel tones and moments of saturated color that appear to be strategically placed. Peering closer, the depicted rooms jump off the canvas, an effect created by the diorama techniques Dougherty integrates into her paintings. The furniture is placed like clothes on a paper doll and tiny photographs (via computer printer) represent the room’s own wall art. Washes of color stand next to intricate patterns while layers of implied horizon lines make a grid for delicate detail work. Think of Matisse’s The Red Studio as a jumping-off point but updated by an 80s-generation kid with a paint brush. -Sunni Johnson, 3/1709, burnaway.org

I received a BA in Latin American studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and learned how to paint with oils in Florence, Italy. There I also discovered a voice through painting my room and the sights from my window (and any other daily sights that bring me joy). Back in North Carolina I created Latino/a art education initiatives around the area to serve and learn from the ever-growing mostly Mexican population there and indoctrinated the young transmigrants into the school of room portraiture. Their vision prompted my move to Mexico City. The stint was so stimulating that instead of being inspired by the usual three sights a week there were about twenty a day that I wanted to capture in paintings. Mexico City was so visually moving because there is no design organization but rather the forms of everything- trees, houses, sidewalks, trash piles- tend to grow organically out of their functions. The practice of everyday life there creates sublime color combinations and jaunty juxtapositions of spiritual, commercial, natural, prec-Columbian, Spanish and contemporary international life. Inside, I built a home in Hotel Virreyes and painted my room there with the stunning expansive polluted populated city right outside my window. I paint with rich oils on paper cut-outs to capture beautiful moments in my surroundings. I have also sung with Pinche Gringo and orchestrated adventures with my friend Susie Simpson. They, along with my brother, David Dougherty, helped me recreate Mexico City at the Found Gallery in LA for the Spatial Reconstruction Project in July 2008. New romantic works were shown at Vacation Gallery and Boutique in Atlanta, Georgia in February and March, 2009. I lived in Greensboro, North Carolina from May 2008-August 2009 and I'm still processing the changes the place has pressed into me. I worked with Mexican and Salvadorian immigrant women with babies under three years old, interpreting and coordinating Mothers Groups for them. I started another Los Artistas program for bilingual Latino/a youth at The Center for Visual Artists and the group painted a social history of Greensboro mural at the HIVE, 1214 Grove Street. The program is still running today. Now I am in sunny Los Angeles working on for a Masters in Fine Arts at UCLA, and will be the Arts Education Coordinator for UCLA for the 2010-2011 school year. Most paintings are plein-air on cut-out paper. I trade, barter and sell my paintings on a sliding scale. Email me at sarahdough@gmail.com. Photos are at www.flickr.com/sarahdough. Thank you for visiting.