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lot earlier than that, but it’s that searching
for the closeness of the ones that I love who
have passed away or—just like the inte-
riors—those people who have disappeared.”
Scarlett with Dishes is an award-winning
painting that features her daughterScarlett next to a child-size hutch filled
with antique dishes. “This is in the
bedroom that I now use for Scarlett, but it’s
before we redid the room. It has 100-year-
old floorboards made from Douglas fir;
they’ve been painted because the finishwas too old to salvage and the baseboards
are probably from the 1920s in there,”
Sauer explains. “The light is beautiful in
that room because it’s one window that
just lights the space up. The strong single
directional light makes the beautiful light
and shadow in there. I set her up in this
vintage-style romper and slowly collected
these pieces that I put together in the
painting. It’s almost like I’m setting up a
still life but incorporating a figure into it.”
When her daughter poses, she often has
her play with the props and takes photos,
and then goes through them to get the
right composition, light and expression.
Outside the subject matter, the color
harmony and palette are important to
Sauer’s work, and in this series of paint-
ings a theme of greens and golds emerged
unknowingly throughout. “The No. 1
thing that draws me into the painting
idea would be the color palette,” the artist
shares. “There were several years when
I was mostly kind of interested in whites
and grays, and the subtle nuances in a
composition where most of the objects
were within that restricted color range.
I found that when the light hit something in
the color of the shadow there are so many
little minute changes and chroma within a
very tight range of value. I thought it was
super beautiful and fascinating. A lot of theRetro Kitchen, oil on panel, 20 x 16 " Nancy in Green, oil on linen, 24 x 1 8"Eventide, oil on linen, 8 x 1 0"