Sarah Konrad

About the Artist

Sarah is inspired by time spent outside studying the natural world as a scientist and playing on the trails near her home with skis, bikes, and running shoes. She loves the quiet of skiing through the woods as the snow on the trees muffles the sounds around her, the noise of the birds and squirrels as she run under their trees, and the sparkle of rime on a pine needle.

Printmaking on a small scale challenges her to abandon fine detail and instead capture the essence of the subject. An individual skier is known by the bend of an arm, the tilt of the head. An aspen tree grows knots in a particular pattern on the trunk and cannot be mistaken for a birch. Water appears blue but is filled with colorful reflections of the paddler. Carving these essential traits into linoleum or wood brings her a deeper recognition and understanding of the natural and athletic worlds.

Sarah has explored multiple professions/avocations, and each one has provided inspiration for the ones that followed. Spending her twenties instructing and guiding backcountry expeditions led to a fascination with ice and snow and graduate degrees in glacial geology and glaciology. Time on snow and ice was also time on skis and was followed by Olympic competition in cross country skiing and biathlon (2006 Olympiad in Torino, Italy). First-hand experience within the inner world international sport led to years volunteering as an athlete advocate. And then…

….on a cold, snowy November night, she wandered through Laramie’s biannual Touchstone Exhibition, where each artist had converted a local hotel room into a small gallery. The ebb and flow was such that she sometimes encountered artists without an audience, and had an opportunity to ask the questions she always wondered about artwork: what are the mechanics of the process? How are the individual steps ordered? Why this material and not the other? A long conversation with a friendly printmaker led to an almost magical invitation, and she soon found herself in her studio learning by doing. She has been infatuated with the artform ever since.

Learn More

You can learn more or purchase Sarah’s artwork outside of Touchstone by going to her website at https://skonrad153.wixsite.com/skon or her Facebook page at facebook.com/SarahKonradArt. Cycling themed prints are also available for sale at Link Cycling in Laramie.