The realistic drawings of Sara Gallagher
By David Masello
The artworks of Sara Gallagher (b. 1990) sometimes come with an asterisk, actual fine print that defines what she does in case someone might be confused. When her San Francisco gallery, CK Contemporary, exhibits her works at Art on Paper in New York or the San Francisco Art Fair, it affixes the following two words: “Pencil drawing.”
As the gallery’s founder and director, Lauren Ellis, says of Gallagher’s work, which she has been showing since 2022, “At art fairs, where people are often walking past our booth and assume that many of our pieces are photographs, we find it helpful to put up that sign, especially for Sara. We make the type size large enough that people can read it from the aisle.”
So uncannily realistic are Gallagher’s drawings of people, rendered in graphite and PanPastel (a highly mixable dry pastel akin to what its manufacturer describes as “velvety paint”), that they are commonly mistaken for photographs. That confusion is about more than just the fact that she possesses the ability to render details with a keen verisimilitude, whether it’s the individual hairs on a head or the look that water assumes in a bathtub. Gallagher’s subjects wear expressions so real, poignant, complex, nuanced, true-to-life that anyone could easily make the mistake about the medium employed.
“From a technical standpoint, Sara’s skill is some of the best I’ve ever seen,” says Ellis, “but she’s able to take that skill and create an emotionally rich beauty. Her figures tell intimate stories for us. While those stories are very specific, Sara captures emotions that are universal to humans.”
At her home studio in Nicasio, California (where Gallagher and her musician husband, Jacob Aranda, account for two of the town’s 98 residents), she can complete one drawing of a figure, imbued with a character and feelings we know to be accurate, in two to six weeks. “There is a little wiggle room, depending on the intricacy of the work,” she explains, “such as one of my recent pieces, ‘Without Sanctuary,’ which is actually my husband posing in the tub. That took eight weeks to complete as the floral background was much more intricate than other, simpler backgrounds.” While that rendering of vines and flowers may have slowed the process, Gallagher was able to capture the mood of her sitter in less time, which is odd, given that the inner life should be the most labor-intensive and elusive to capture.
Surrounded by the towering redwood trees that grow an hour north of San Francisco, Gallagher draws every day, often beginning the morning with a walk through the mighty forest with her dog. “My actual pencil-to-paper time averages five to eight hours a day,” she says, “but I often end up working 12 hours, which includes thinking as I take walks or stop to play the banjo and sing.”
Continue reading in Fine Art Connoisseur (May/June 2024)
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