Sarah Danes Jarrett

Sarah Danes Jarrett was born in the United Kingdom in 1964. After her family emigrated in 1966, she grew up in Zimbabwe and studied commercial art at Harare Technikon, obtaining a diploma in graphic design in 1985.

A year later, Sarah moved to South Africa and began her career in the design industry, which was awarded three CLIOs and two London International Advertising Awards.

When she became a mother in 1998, she retired from design and bought her first blank canvas, oil paints and brushes in 2000.

Sarah Danes Jarrett is considered one of the best naturalistic artists in the country today.

She has been featured in many magazines and has also presented her works internationally, including in numerous group exhibitions.

Of the over 500 works Sarah has created, most have been purchased by international buyers. Her works can be found in private collections in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Ireland and England, but also in America, Sweden, Austria, the Middle East, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Sarah has completed around 50 commissioned works and, in response to frequent requests, has donated numerous works to charity auctions.

She lives with her family in Wynberg, Cape Town.

Although her work is often described as chaotic, she considers every stroke; the color, the length of the brush stroke, and the direction. Sarah layers the color until she feels it is right and then reaches for her white tube.

When creating her exquisite, blocky and large-format portraits, Sarah Danes Jarrett places particular emphasis on white in her work. She is a self-confessed order fanatic. For her, a flat white background 'corrects' the finished work of art. For Sarah, it brings order to the chaos and holds the work together. She uses white for the face and the background, all edges must be precise.

“I have always worked on people, faces,

I love the translucency & reflection of skin,

confrontational eyes that narrate a story I can't vocalise.

My style is paradoxically chaotic and controlled,

Brazen and aggressive brush strokes form soft curves, precisely cut with a sharp edge.

My controlling personality tries to form some order in a world that is constantly in flux.

I use colors that bear no similarity to skin.

and shameless scale to break our intimacy barriers.”