WINNING PAINTING

This month’s front cover image

Sally Roberts Quarantine, oil, 27½319½ in (70350cm).

Sally is an emerging artist who works primarily in oils and is based in Lancashire, England. She holds a BA in Painting from Wimbledon College of Arts. Her work has been shown in the UK and China and she recently exhibited in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition and the Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize. She paints portraits, usually of women from the perspective of a female artist, using traditional techniques to represent the modern world. She aims to capture the moment before it disappears and wants her art to say ‘this is who we are now’.

Sally says: ‘Quarantine was finished around the time that the first lockdown began. I was considering the complications of domestic life and how being in quarantine adds pressure to this. Three of the figures look out at the audience (at someone or something), while the fourth figure, which is a selfportrait, does not. Empty plates are laid on the table. They are waiting for something to happen. This is a painting of a moment just before the event.

‘I was playing with hot and cold colours in this painting. I used a burning orange ground as I like to have a coloured ground to paint on. It is something to work with and against. It adds an element of chance to how the figures will appear. The faces are what is most important to me; I am fascinated by faces. Here the figures show a mixture of anticipation, uncertainty and dread, feelings that many shared at the beginning of lockdown.’