At the Table with: Sarah Beurup-Neal
-28 Questions on Practice + Business, Answered
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Sarah Bearup-Neal, the Glen Arbor Arts Association Gallery Manager. Sarah conducts monthly ‘Creativity Q+As’ with writers, performing and visual artists, GAAC artist-members, and other Northern Michigan makers. They discuss process, technique, tools, materials and the influence of place on practice.
Below I’m sharing our conversation. Feel free to save it (yes, there is a save option on Substack!) and come back to it, as it’s rather lengthy! If it’s helpful, the first half is more process focused, and second half is more business focused.
I hope you enjoy our conversation!
Sarah: Describe the medium in which you work.
Katherine: Right now I primarily work in acrylic paint on wood panels. My work occasionally will embrace mixed-media elements, so I’ll use pencil, charcoal, pastels — often on top of my acrylic paint. I frequently paint in gouache. And something I’m hoping to experiment with this year is oil painting. Always trying new things.
Sarah: Why oil paint?
Katherine: I have a very short attention span when it comes to my painting. I just want to continue moving onto the next phase of it — in that way, acrylic is really nice because it dries so quickly. In the way I want to embrace a looser depiction of my figures or subjects, I think oil paint has those softer edges I’m looking for. Also, oil paint colors have a more intense vibrancy to them. It’s hard to achieve that in acrylic paint. It’ll be an experiment. We’ll see.
Sarah: Do you need someone to help guide you through the basics of oil painting? Or, have you had some experience with it?
Katherine: I’ve had a little experience with it. One of my studio mates, Alyssa Smith, had an oil painting workshop in our studio last year that I attended. It’s nice to have friends I can [ask questions of]. The daunting thing about oil paint is it is more hazardous, and you want to make sure you’re using the right materials to minimize your toxic exposure.
Sarah: Where’s your studio?
Katherine: In downtown Traverse City [Michigan], at the Tru Fit Trouser Building. I feel so lucky to have found that space. I found it shortly after we’d moved here [from Wisconsin] in 2019. I’d been going to Vada Color to get print reproductions of my work, and VADA Color is located in the Tru Fit campus. I met Eric Gerstner, who owns and renovated the building. The old Habitat For Humanity ReStore was moving out, and he had this enormous space available. That was way too much space — I think it was about 9,000 square feet. I told [Eric] what I was looking for, and we came up with breaking up the space into a casual studio set up — our walls don’t go up to the ceiling so we can talk with each other across the wall.
Sarah: In your November 14 blog post you wrote: “Like most of my paintings, the photos in this folder are from scenes found in my life (often mundane, but occasionally novel, for me at least …)” Talk about that a little bit.
Katherine: I’m not unique in that I draw a lot of inspiration from my personal life. Today, we’re so lucky because we constantly have a camera with us, in our smart phone. Living in Northern Michigan, I feel lucky that we spend a lot of our time outside. What I gravitate toward, and what I’m most known for, are my beach paintings. I spend a lot of time on the beach in the summer, and feel lucky to do that. On the beach you have this perfect set-up — if you enjoy painting figures, which I do — that creates a still life for you. The sand is a neutral backdrop, you have this amazing light source with nothing obstructing it, and you get these interesting shadow shapes created on the uneven [surface of] the sand. I’m very inspired when I’m at the beach. It’s usually just people sitting on towels, or talking to each other, or shaking a towel out. I find the movement and the change in light and the patterns [cast] by everything you bring with you to the beach to be really interesting — both from a color theory standpoint because you have all these interesting colors and values going on; and from a composition standpoint because you have people sitting down and standing up, and there’s not really any other time in your day-to-day life that you’ll find that many figures [in the same place] unless you’re at life-drawing class. I used to live in Chicago, and I’d sketch people sitting on the L train; but at the beach you’re lucky that most people are in their swimsuits. You get really good light on the bare figure.
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