Sabrina Stiles | Enjoying the Struggle

Sabrina Stiles embraces the challenges of harnessing light, color, and mood in the landscape

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

This story was featured in the February 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

“I ENJOY ASKING ‘What if?’ every day, the excitement of facing a blank surface, and the anticipation of what it will become.” Such musings not only reveal Sabrina Stiles’ thirst for creativity, but also point to the gratitude and tenacity that define her art practice. Every pastel landscape delivers a thrill and a challenge to Stiles, who celebrates both as she meticulously composes vignettes saturated in light, color, and quiet energy.

Stiles, who lives and works in Longmont, CO, never envisioned herself as a professional artist. In fact, the global concept of art as life never even crossed her mind. Growing up in Flint, MI, Stiles didn’t have a relationship with art. Though she enjoyed drawing as a child, she wasn’t exposed to art in museums or other places, nor did she understand it as something to do professionally. “I drew, but it wasn’t in the forefront,” she says. Art simply wasn’t a part of her cultural microcosm.

Once she reached adulthood, Stiles held positions as varied as biomedical electronics engineer, paralegal, cosmetologist, and coffeehouse proprietor. “I’ve definitely gained the ability to self-teach, manage my time, and persevere,” she reflects. Given her wide range of experiences and desire to continuously evolve, perhaps it was a logical conclusion that almost four decades after her childhood doodles, Stiles decided to return to art, this time seeking out a much deeper level of understanding.
She experienced this realization in 2001, when she decided to display artwork in her Denver-area coffeehouse. The more time she spent looking at the paintings on the walls, the more her interest transformed from appreciation to a desire to create. Her old love of drawing came flooding back, and she decided to put pencil to paper once again. “I thought, ‘I really want to do this. I think I could do this,’” Stiles recalls. She took a few lessons during that time, but her day job and family life took
precedence—as is so often the case—and she pushed her art-making to the back burner. It wasn’t until 2008 that she decided once again to seize the day and pursue her new calling.

At that point, Stiles took a pastel workshop with a local artist, followed by classes at the Art Students League of Denver, and she eventually started entering her work into shows. “Things snowballed from there,” she says. Stiles was accepted into her first juried exhibition in 2012, and over the next several years she began to win prizes, sell work, and find gallery representation. Soon she was able to begin life as a full-time artist. “I never dreamed I’d be at the level I’m at now,” she says. “I’m very flattered that people would be interested in my work and having it selected for shows and winning awards. Who would’ve thought?” However, she remains ever mindful of looking at her accomplishments with humility, realizing she always has more to learn.

IN FACT, WRESTLING with the challenges along the creative path is what drives Stiles to keep painting, to continue pushing herself to hone and perfect, to seek out and discover techniques, subject matter, and anything else that might contribute to her growth. “I believe in taking risks and trying new things to grow as an artist,” she remarks. When Stiles started out, she initially painted still lifes and expected that they would be her primary focus. But then she took a class in landscape painting and experienced working en plein air, and she found that interpreting the landscape captured her attention and fulfilled her creative aspirations. At the same time, it presented her with the challenges of categorizing the vastness of nature and discerning which elements might best compose an aesthetically and emotionally engaging scene.

“For me, it’s more about the mood,” Stiles says of her fascination with capturing the landscape in two dimensions. It is often natural light that sets that mood, and though Stiles enjoys painting rich evening light and bright, sunny scenes, she more often responds to fog, clouds, and nocturnes. In fact, she feels nurtured by the intimacy precipitated by the soft drama of snowy grays or the nighttime glow that emerges in the moonlight. “That’s what really appeals to me,” she says, “that feeling you get with a certain kind of sky. I think that’s what moves me—the light in the landscape.”

Stiles likes to paint a variety of objects within the landscape, including bodies of water and the occasional cow, and she prides herself in being open to a broad spectrum of subject matter. She selects potential material as she explores the spaces near her Colorado home or while traveling with her husband. Her camera always at the ready, she constantly photographs her surroundings, and to date she has accumulated around 20,000 pictures that she uses for reference material. When she’s working on site, the artist is especially drawn to scenes with striking or unusual light effects.

Stiles paints outdoors but reserves the bulk of her work for the studio, as it affords her time and space to design and execute each piece without the constraints of fading daylight or failing weather. “I find that in the studio, I feel that I have more control,” she says. Though Stiles has occasionally worked in oils and acrylics, she has always had an affinity for pastels. She first worked with them while taking a class and soon adopted the medium as her primary one. Simply put, she feels comfortable with pastels. She enjoys the feel of them in her hand and the immediacy of placing pigment directly on paper. She relishes their instantaneous, identifiable marks. “Just grabbing a pastel and putting the color on—that’s really appealing,” she says.

She also enjoys the fact that pastels require less time to prepare and clean up—no brushes to clean, no paint to mix, no palettes to balance—thus allowing the artist instant access to the surface. Technically, pastels are always workable, simplifying the editing process. Likewise, they remain colorfast and stable, retaining their vibrancy over time. Because she often works with intricate light values, this aspect is advantageous. “How versatile they are really appeals to me,” she says. During her career, she has incorporated watercolor, oil, acrylic, and alcohol washes into her pastel work, and she’s been pleased with the way they fuse together. Stiles works on a number of grounds, including archival paper and multi-media board, both of which stand up to her rigorous process of layering, marking, and occasional resurfacing with pumice and gesso. Not unlike her visual and technical explorations, she views surfaces as always subject to improvement.

STILES WRITES, “It’s the challenge and endless possibility of creating two-dimensional slices of life that motivates me as an artist.” To that end, she paints with pastels in a deliberate manner, thoughtful about strengthening her skills with every line or shade or burst of color. In doing this, she aims to strike a balance among the creativity, emotion, and skill it takes to materialize her vision. Stiles is tenacious in her method as well: She knows what she wants to achieve and continues working until the composition embodies her idea visually and conceptually. Indeed, Stiles listens to her paintings while she works, forging a dialogue as she goes and staying true to each painting’s path.

“I always like to challenge myself,” she explains. So she often comes up with exercises for herself, such as allowing herself only 30 minutes to finish a painting, committing to completing one painting every day, or working with a limited color palette. One of her more notable challenges involved working in abstraction as a means to loosen her style and paint landscapes through the lens of their most rudimentary elements. In particular, she sought to explore how to make abstract pieces visually engaging from both near and far. “I wanted them to be able to be seen from across the room or up close and still be interesting and nice to look at,” she says. To accomplish this, she focused on utilizing a limited palette and economic yet effective mark-making to convey the essence of the landscape. Ultimately, Stiles’ abstract series became a pillar of her larger body of work. “Starting with nothing and making a painting. It was a lot of fun,” she says of the experimental pieces.

“There’s a bit of struggle with every painting, and you’re always going to gain something from that struggle,” adds Stiles, whose art practice has turned out to be more about the journey than the destination—a steady effort to improve how she visually communicates the landscape in all its distinctive moods. After all, if she arrived at her destination, where else would she have to go as an artist?

Ultimately, the challenge of making art provides abundant, ongoing opportunities for Stiles, in both her successes and failures, which encourage her to work harder or try a different approach. “I’m just going to enjoy the struggle,” says Stiles. “There are many ways to approach a painting. There are so many options—that’s what makes it exciting.”

representation
Ann Korologos Gallery, Basalt, CO; The Glass Tipi Gallery, Ward, CO; Mary Williams Fine Arts, Boulder, CO; www.sabrinastiles.com.

This story was featured in the February 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

MORE RESOURCES FOR ART COLLECTORS & ENTHUSIASTS
• Subscribe to Southwest Art magazine
• Learn how to paint & how to draw with downloads, books, videos & more from North Light Shop
• Sign up for your Southwest Art email newsletter & download a FREE ebook