Sara Dykstra
- May 15
- 4 min read
Sara Dykstra is a painter based between Portland, Oregon and San Francisco. During college in Baltimore she made 140 small paintings of light on two chimneys outside her studio and has been painting light ever since. She got into iridescent pigments through ancient Fayum mummy portraits and their use of gold leaf. She develops her own pigment recipes and paints on unstretched canvas kept rolled up like a scroll. She calls her marks invented hieroglyphs.
Q: You've been painting for a long time now, from Baltimore to San Francisco to Portland. How has the work changed along the way?
A: I studied at MICA in Baltimore, where I focused on traditional painting before turning to light as subject matter. During my junior year, I made 140 small paintings of light grazing two chimneys outside my studio window—beginning an ongoing exploration of light as a way of understanding and holding experience.
Each place I've lived has reshaped my palette and practice. In San Francisco, the skies fluctuated between near-blinding white light and enveloping fog. There, I painted from delicate theater sets draped in translucent scrims, with forms hovering between presence and disappearance. After relocating to Oregon, lush greens and jewel-toned foliage filtered into my palette.
Now a mother, I am mesmerized by my daughter's unselfconscious way of painting. Observing her joy and curiosity shifted something in me—I let go of the constructed sets, embracing a more open, intuitive process that led me back to light with renewed freedom.
Q: How did iridescent pigments become such a big part of your work?
A: When I moved to San Francisco to pursue my MFA at CCA, I returned to a familiar strategy: painting the same subject repeatedly to ground myself amid change. I made a series of portraits of a friend, each on a different colored ground—yellows, pinks, greens, blues—and became interested in how these shifts altered my perception of the person.
Looking at ancient Fayum Egyptian mummy portraits, I was drawn to their attempt to hold both likeness and soul, and to their use of gold leaf. I began incorporating aluminum leaf and iridescent pigment into my own grounds. As light moved across the surface, the image shifted—and with it, the sense of the subject.
Working later with Rosana Castrillo Díaz, I developed mica-infused off-whites for a mural at SFMOMA and began building my own archive of recipes, turning my studio into a laboratory of light and perception.
Q: You describe your marks as invented hieroglyphs. What do you mean by that?
A: When I paint, I enter each sitting as openly as possible, without ideas about the outcome, like a meditation. Working on unstretched canvas or linen laid flat on a table, both ends are rolled close together like a scroll. I reveal only a small working area at a time, which limits distraction and keeps me fully focused on the conversation of the brushwork.
Because the iridescent ground loses its luminosity if disturbed, each mark remains—nothing can be wiped out. The process becomes intuitive and accumulative. I view it like a poem or a story unfolding—an invented hieroglyphic language. Each mark functions as both image and record, holding the time of its making.
As the canvas is gradually unrolled, it reveals a passage of time: marks gathered into a continuous field that becomes a psychological terrain shaped through sustained attention and intuition.
Q: You did residencies in Brittany and Aix-en-Provence. Did France change anything for you as a painter?
A: France was formative to my development as a painter. I spent six months in Aix-en-Provence, arriving with the intention to paint, but soon became more interested in light itself as a medium. The light there was clear and crisp—qualities I would later recognize in California.
I began creating installations and sculptures using transparent scrim fabrics, allowing light to pass through and become the primary material. At the time, I was deeply engaged with artists such as Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, and the broader California Light and Space movement.
While in Brittany, my studio was in a 9th-century abbey, where light streaming through the windows led me to study Vermeer and Vuillard's interiors.
The evolution of my practice has been circular and reflective, often returning to earlier bodies of work as a way to move forward—the scrim fabrics later reappearing in my theater sets, where light, influenced by Vermeer, becomes the subject.
Q: You were a Visiting Artist at Dartmouth Medical School. That's an unusual context. How did that come about?
A: My year as a Visiting Artist was unusual and in many ways a love story. An old friend I had recently reconnected with was studying medicine there and learned the school was seeking art for a campus beautification project. With my training in classical figurative painting, I proposed a series capturing the institution's three-hundred-year history of medicine. It was accepted, and I moved to New Hampshire.
During that year, I completed three large paintings, now exhibited in the medical school lecture halls and hospital: the first X-ray, the first intensive care unit—both at Dartmouth—and a scene of the founder, Nathan Smith, making a house call on horseback with students.
I also led evening life-drawing sessions for medical students, offering another way of understanding the body through observation, and a restorative pause from the intensity of their training. I remained in New Hampshire for several years, and married the man who first encouraged me to pursue the project.
Q: What's ahead for you right now?
A: Living in the Pacific Northwest has become important to my studio practice. The lush and colorful, mist-filled landscape offers a sense of quiet and focus that has supported my work.
In the coming months, I will be completing several commissioned projects while continuing to develop this body of work. I am also beginning to explore an inversion in my paintings, working with matte grounds and iridescent brushwork.
I continue building my practice here while traveling regularly to San Francisco, and look forward to an upcoming trip to London this summer to view exhibitions. I am particularly thrilled to see Cecily Brown's show at the Serpentine; her work has been a longstanding inspiration to me.
