On Staying with the Landscape | The Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals — No. 20

The last journal was about making for the sheer pleasure of it. This week’s is about what can happen when that instinct stays with you throughout life. Some artists spend years searching for their subject. Sarah Anderson seems to have recognised hers early in her career.

A woman with blonde hair sits on a teal folding chair in an artist's studio, holding a paintbrush. She is wearing a navy blue long-sleeve top and mustard yellow pants.
The artist Sarah Anderson in her studio.

Growing up in Galloway, she remembers being fascinated by salmon stakes: those upright structures cutting through the water, their repeated vertical lines interrupting an otherwise open landscape. It was the shape and rhythm of them that caught her attention. Over time, those verticals became trees.

It is a small detail, but one that seems to contain rather a lot of Sarah’s story. Landscape has remained at the centre of her work ever since, not because she has lacked the curiosity to wander elsewhere, but because she continues to find it endlessly captivating.

She was fortunate to encounter an accomplished artist early. Davy Brown taught Sarah art when she was young, and she remembers sneaking a look at whatever he happened to be working on at the back of the art room. There is something rather lovely about the thought of a future professional artist quietly studying the work of her teacher knowing now she followed in Brown’s large footsteps. The connection has acquired a pleasing circularity for us too. Sarah has returned to The Torrance Gallery, while we welcome Davy back in 2027 for a solo show.

Rocks at Fascadale, Sarah Anderson, available at The Torrance Gallery.

She went on to study Fine Art in Edinburgh, through the joint programme between the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1999. Even then, the landscape was already there. Her degree-show work was minimalist and atmospheric: pared-back compositions concerned with space, mood and the essential forms of the places she was looking at.

Sarah has experimented along the way — including trying her hand at encaustic along with other workshops — but has repeatedly found herself drawn back to the same fundamental concerns. There is a tendency when talking about artists to make development sound synonymous with reinvention. New medium. New subject. Dramatic new phase.

Sarah seems entirely comfortable with continuity.

Her territory is Scottish landscape: west-coast weather, distant hills, trees, water, changing skies and the particular drama created when light moves quickly across a place. She speaks so passionately about Scottish landscapes especially Harris.

 “I never really tire of painting the Scottish landscape. There’s always something different in the light, the weather or the colour, even in places I know well.”


Harris Blues, Sarah Anderson, available at The Torrance Gallery.

Most of the finished paintings are made back in the studio. Sarah travels a great deal, taking photographs and making preparatory drawings and sketches outside, before returning to work from that accumulated material.

What she is after is not a literal record. She talks about colour as a way of creating mood — moodiness, certainly, but never drabness. That distinction feels important when looking at her paintings. Scottish weather gives her shadow, movement, tonal depth and atmosphere, but the work is never allowed to sink into grey melancholy. Colour keeps pushing back. Land and sea provide texture. Weather provides drama.

A close-up portrait of a woman with light brown hair looking to the side, set against a softly blurred painting of warm orange, red, and purple tones.
Sarah Anderson in front of her canvas.

And beneath all of it there is a very assured hand. Sarah established a studio early on although the pace changed after the arrival of her two daughters, now seventeen and nineteen. Asked about her children, her answer was immediate: her best creations are her girls. Now her girls are grown, she feels fully back in her stride.

There is very little hesitation when she talks about her work. She knows the landscapes that interest her, the atmosphere she is trying to create and the visual language she has developed to do it. After decades of working professionally, there is a confidence that comes not from having stopped questioning, but from knowing which questions are worth continuing to ask.

That confidence extends to the practical business of being an artist too. Sarah has always approached painting as a profession as well as a creative life, and there is something refreshing about the straightforwardness with which she does so.

The work still begins, however, with a passion for Scotland: a particular sky, the shape of a coastline, trees against water, a sudden change in the weather. Everything else comes afterwards.

A framed abstract landscape painting featuring a dramatic sky with pink, purple, and blue clouds, a distant mountain range, and reflective water or salt flats in shades of blue, green, and gold. The painting is housed in a black frame and displayed against a dark wood background.
Rock Pools, Laig Bay, Sarah Anderson, available at The Torrance Gallery.

Sarah is returning to The Torrance Gallery after some time away, and we very much hope this is the beginning of a long new chapter with us. There is something particularly satisfying about welcoming back an artist whose work already feels so assured, while still leaving room for what comes next.

There is a tendency to describe an artist’s career as a series of departures: new subjects, new media, new directions. Sarah’s has been shaped just as much by staying.

Staying with landscape. Staying with colour. Staying with weather, distance and atmosphere.

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