A collection of Sarah's works, many recent works, are being featured at the East Aurora Co-op Cafe Gallery this month. Opening with the Spring East Aurora Art Walk, Friday April 28, from 5-9pm.
Sarah DeLozier Roelofs (American, 1934-) realist artist, designer, illustrator, typographic designer and teacher known for her landscape and still life paintings. She received her B.A. at the Centre College of Kentucky majoring in Art and English. She went on to receive her M.S. at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology in visual communication and was the recipient of the Moholy-Nagy Scholorship, Chicago, IL. She also studied portrait and drawing for five years at the Art Students League, NYC and painting and design at the College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY. She has exhibited locally for the Buffalo Art Society, Buffalo, NY; the Kenan Center, Lockport, NY; the Roycroft Shops and the Roycroft Summer Festival, both in East Aurora, NY.
She was employed by the Department of City Planning in Chicago, IL designing the newspaper, posters and illustrations for various projects. She worked in the graphics department for Playboy Magazine, also in Chicago. She went on to work at the University of Chicago Press designing covers for paperback books, doing magazine illustrations and created typographics for their book designs. While there, she received two awards from the Chicago Society of Typographic Artists for her designs.
She was selected for the gifted/talented art program, 3rd-9th grade and received first prize in the City of Louisville Children’s Art Program, Louisville, KY. She also taught art for fifteen years in the K-12th grade classes in the Westchester County Public Schools, NY. She retired from teaching in 1992 and moved to her family farm in the Western New York area where she still resides and maintains her studio.
Artists Statement:
Buying the family farm in 1989, then retiring from teaching art, and moving to Western New York in 1992 were the catalysts for most of my recent paintings. Living here in this countryside, surrounded by amazing beauty thrills me and has provided endless subject matter for my studies of nature.
In fair weather I work outside, standing at the easel, or sitting in the back of my station wagon, and in poor weather I usually set up a studio still-life of something yummy to eat.
I’ve been gardening and surrounding myself with large and small pets since I was a child, and they’ve usually both become subjects in my paintings. My realism has been heavily influenced by my study of the portrait in New York at the Art Students League. There I refined my use of color and reflected light, so that now as I try to express my “world” in portraits, I hope I also preserve the joy of sunshine, fresh air and our good world.-Sarah Roelofs
(Rewritten & compiled by Mark Strong of Meibohm Fine Arts, Inc., East Aurora, NY, 03/2009, Sources: Artist’s biographical information; and Our internal records)
