Sara Richard – The North vs The South Art Exhibition

Sara Richard – Portsmouth, NH

The North vs The South Art Exhibition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

I’m an illustrator from a little old seaside town in New Hampshire. I love to create and when I’m not making art I’m daydreaming of future pieces. In my mind I create art for fun, to make beautiful things, to make interesting things and not to do it purely to make some earth shattering statement. Sometimes it takes a moment of recognizing something fun and new, something enough to distract you from the stress of reality that can say so much more than a political or social injustice piece. I love strange juxtopositions and I feel that comes through in a lot of my preferred subjects. I also have a profound respect for the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements and have adopted recognizable lines and shapes of those genres into some of my pieces.

I love comics, toys, cartoons, art history, anything nerdy: I will devour it like a fat kid at IHOP. Cosplay is another one of my many geek-tacular activities. I’m a part of a cosplay team called Human Sushi with my two best friends, Abby and J’aimie (see our finer nerd-moments on the Youtube). Also I love ghost hunting and usually try to see whatever venues town’s haunted hotspots. So far I have to say The Queen Mary in Long Beach is my favorite. I wish I could live in that ship! I hang glide during nice weather and paint the rest of the time. Doctor Who episodes fill in the gaps and karaoke finishes it all off.

Credits of past work are that I’ve illustrated the kid’s book from Yen Press, “Kitty and Dino” which has been nominated for a 2013 Eisner Award (Best Publication for Young Readers) and have been steadily working on variant covers for the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic series from IDW. I also illustrated a story in issue #5 of IDW’sWomanthology as well. Currently I’m working on a series of pieces to pitch as gallery work and an art book. I plan on moving in the direction of gallery work and fashion. I also plan to create another children’s book and am currently working on my own ghost story based off of the Queen Mary.

A couple last tidbits be these: I’m heavily inspired by Art Deco, Art Nouveau and also Japanese Ink Paintings (sumi-e) for their simplicity in composition, so much so that my signature is “Sara” in katakana (the Japanese alphabet system for foreign words and names.) and that I try to emulate the simplicity and movement in my work. And also, I’m terrified of centipedes.