Sarah McEneaney

Sarah McEneaney paints autobiographical narratives based on her immediate surroundings, such as this interior of the bedroom she lived in during her 1995 artist’s residency at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Working from observation, memory, and imagination, McEneaney captures the emotional as well as the physical character of a particular situation or event, whether mundane or dramatic, with remarkably vivid detail, colors, and patterns. McEneaney's use of egg tempera recalls early Renaissance panel painting, but she significantly rejects the use of one-point perspective typical of Western art since that era. In viewing the details of her experiences we observe the artist’s life, while we are asked to contemplate our own.