ELEVEN SIX WOMEN | SARAH BOYTS YODER

Sarah wears the Sara Cardi in Cocoa styled with her own jeans.

Can you share your background, training, and journey to becoming the artist you are today?

 
I grew up as the oldest of four kids in Fort Worth, TX.  I loved reading and drawing from the start and thanks to encouraging parents and teachers at each step through public school, undergrad university and finally a masters degree in Painting, that love got a chance to develop into what my career is now. 

I always knew I wanted to be an artist and especially a painter.  I spent no time in between undergraduate and graduate school trying to find my way or questioning my path.  Even now, my focus is intense, and I feel so grateful, working as hard as I possibly can at something that gives me purpose and energy every time I’m in the studio, but also moving and navigating through life. While some artists are also part of the academic world, involved in teaching, lecturing or writing, when you look at my CV it’s all exhibitions and residencies.  I would enjoy teaching, but this is how my path has unfolded.  Since 2006, I’ve been a part of almost 50 solo or group exhibitions and completed several artistic residencies, both of which I love doing. 

 

 

We have a mutual love for color! Your paintings feel bold, playfully spontaneous, and generously provide color therapy to the viewer. Can you share your artistic process and how you work with color?

 

I DO love color!  It’s a driving force and one I get so much pleasure and satisfaction from.  I choose colors while I’m outside of the studio by instinct, ones that I’m really drawn to, without considering how they’ll interact with anything else.  When I bring them into the studio I don’t have to keep my brain ‘on’ and can simply react.  I think this leads to many unexpected combinations and intersections.  Color really communicates!  I love when you can set a conversation in motion.

 I’m happy hearing that the playful and spontaneous qualities come through in my work because that is really the posture, viewpoint, mode I’m in while painting in the studio.  My work is very improvisational and I always strive to stay in motion.  One would think that means I’m doing a thousand different things, all over the place, but in reality, the forms and moves in my work come from quite a small and personal vocabulary.  

When my children were small and there wasn’t much time to work, my eyes and mind were by necessarily wide open and hungry.  While reading to them one day I came across an illustration in a children's book and that one form was and is the seed from which every move I make now comes from.  It just instantly downloaded into my world and I couldn’t stop repeating it.  It took off and took on a life of its own.  It’s now one of maybe 10 or so shapes that I constantly use. This is how I start paintings and my process is comprised of combining, stretching, cutting, enlarging this set of shapes.  Think of them as my musical notes if I were a musician.  There are only 12 notes on the scale but they can be combined and layered and bent and intersected in infinite ways.

 

Sarah wears head-to-to set Nora Cardi & Margo Skirt.

 

 

 

The Georgia O'Keefe quote you reference on your website home page is very powerful: "Stones, bones, clouds – experience gives me shapes." Can you speak to reoccurring shapes that come up in your work? Do they become part of your hand’s sensory memory?

The illustration I mention above was actually from a book about Georgia O’Keefe and her life!

I loved the Abstract Expressionists because of the emotion I felt when I looked at their painting, but many of those artists were deeply invested in uncovering an inner self, or subconscious, pointing inward.  I was and am much more interested in the world around us, pointing outward, outside of us, and all that simultaneously goes into our experience of it.  Finding that form in a book as I read to my kids, at that place and time in my life is an example of what I think it means to me for experience to give us shapes.  These paintings are deeply connected to the world and part of it, while being worlds of their own.  I want this to come through when one looks at them.  That they might feel alive, with us, is what I hope for.

 

 

I love how we discovered you through your 'Quarantine Studio' Series on IG, and have now come together using your work Orange Emanations as the inspiration behind our ELEVEN SIX Fall 2024 Artist Collaboration Pieces. Creating this body of work during quarantine, how would you describe your pandemic experience as an active artist? 

It’s hard to remember now how dark and scary that time was in early 2020.  School had shut down, like almost everything else.  I couldn't go to my regular studio to work and the world felt like it was changing so much and so fast.  We were also incredibly isolated from one another and increasingly alone.  I texted something to a friend like ‘I’m sending you healing and loving vibes’.  It’s something we’ve all said before without really thinking but I started thinking.  What would actual ‘vibes’ look like?  Certainly, they are energetic, in motion, and rhythmic.  We’ve seen illustrations of sound and light waves. And, certainly there are parallels in the natural physical world too, think of ripples in water, tree rings, a geode, seashells. 

So, I started painting, very meditatively, these somewhat symmetrical, very colorful, reverberating paintings.  Color is also comforting and in its own way, very energetic.  It felt like a path to follow when all the familiar paths seemed to be gone.  Making these works were a pure emotional response to the experience during that specific time of the pandemic. They were all made in the little shed in my backyard where I had retreated, on the floor, on my knees, crouched over in a prayerful posture. 

When I look at these paintings now, especially when gathered together, I see them as manifestations of what I wished for myself, and for others, then and now.  Talismans to call forth shelter, protection, warmth, escape, luck, brightness, joy, guidance, color.

 

 

You are a Mother of two teenagers. How have you balanced your art around Motherhood, and, how has Motherhood informed your art through the years?

 

What a gift they are!  Right away I felt the relief of being removed from the center of myself.  I’ve always kept a studio going alongside being with them and raising them.  And every moment I could, I would paint.  That has changed each year as they’ve grown and my painting world would open up a little more.

From them I’ve gotten all I’ve wanted and needed in my work.  Skills like thinking spontaneously and improvising translate perfectly to the studio.  So do qualities like playfulness and mischievousness and joy and not taking myself or things too seriously.  There really isn’t a balance, time is a zero-sum game.  I don’t waste time in the studio, I feel the drive and energy I have to be there and work is such an asset and it’s the bright side to basically always being on call.  This has been really crucial to my experiences at artist residencies.  For now, the longest I will be away working is about one week and I can make so much with all those hours, channeling the desire to paint and often not being able to into a marathon of artmaking of sorts!    

Taking care of them has also made me a much more decisive and fast-moving artist even though I’m not necessarily like that in my other life.  There isn’t time to keep second guessing in the studio or overthinking before attempting something new, you just dive in and try it.  It’s not a rush, more like a constant persistence.  A favorite quote is from Goethe: ‘Do not hurry, do not rest’.  

 

We adore your Ojo de Dios rug collaboration with Holding Forth where you partnered with Moroccan weaving artists to translate your beautiful artworks into striking floor-art for the home. Can you share more about this collaboration and how it came about?

I loved this project SO much!  It was like playing a game of telephone with other artists, sending an idea out and seeing what they sent back.  Tracey had been importing rugs directly from Morocco for a while and I would sometimes help her photograph them.  Each one is like a painting - perfectly asymmetrical, intensely colorful and with beautiful abstract symbols and narrative.  

At some point along the way we decided to try this translation, painting into wool.  We simply sent a digital image via WhatsApp to Tracey’s contact in Morocco and several weeks later a rug came back.  It was incredible!  I feel it’s necessary to say that there was no checking for color or composition accuracy on our part at any point.  We really wanted it to be a true translation - one idea in paint on canvas or paper, now handwoven into wool and on a large scale.  Each time I couldn’t wait to see how the artists interpreted, in their own medium and with such expertise, the original idea.  Always a delightful surprise and so, so, special.  

One of the rugs is still available HERE and is actually based on a small painting from this same Quarantine Studio series featured online via ELEVEN SIX.   

 

Do you have anything exciting going on right now, or, in the pipeline for your artworks?

I have a two-person exhibition up now at Bond Millen Gallery in Richmond, Virginia called INHABIT.  It’s up until September 21st and consists of paintings by me and ceramic sculpture by Abby Kasonik

Here is a link to the gallery website and information on the exhibition including a fabulous video. See video HERE

I’ll have two works on paper at Art Gotham in New York in a group show called Paper Planes which opens September 12th. View HERE

And finally, I just had a lovely podcast interview with Brian Alfred of Sound & Vision Podcast, you can hear the episode on Spotify LISTEN HERE

 

Sarah wears the Kayln Cardi in Cocoa styled with the Leah Pants in Ivory.

We observe you wear a lot of classic black in contrast to your colorful work. How would you describe your personal style and dressing code?

I’ve always loved wearing black and feel comfortable and very myself in it.  Haha, I remember my outfit from back at middle school graduation was a black linen short set from The Limited!  I love the simplicity of it and how that simplicity can highlight interesting angles or shapes of the garment or the accessories like unique shoes or special jewelry.  There is something to being able to focus on other things because you aren’t fussing with a complicated outfit.  It’s very freeing.

 

What does the ELEVEN SIX brand mean to you, and, which are your favorite Fall pieces to integrate with your own style and wardrobe?

That ELEVEN SIX works with specific materials that are from a specific place with artisans who are FROM that place and carry that expertise makes the pieces very special.  I love the details like the length and tightness of the cuff on certain sweaters (like the Nora Cardi) that give sleeves volume and shape which contrast to the length of the piece or how it is cropped.  The colors are rich and my favorite sweater, the Sara Cardi, is incredibly light and soft but still manages to feel thick and cozy.  It’s thoughtful and artful and pays respect to how and what each piece is made of.  I especially loved seeing the handwritten tags with the name of the knitting artist!