Artist: Sari Staggs

Title: Garlic Vendor

Medium: Watercolor on Paper

Art Dimensions: 40 H x 30 W inches

Framed Dimensions: 51 H x 41 W inches

Item Description: Oaxaca 1974


ARTIST BIO:

Sari Staggs is noted for her large-scale, colorful, and stylized watercolor paintings.

Born Saralee Ann Lowry, in Los Angeles, she grew up in a variety of small California towns.

She showed an early interest in the arts, which her mother encouraged. After a meandering and uneventful early education she entered college with majors in both art and English at El Camino College after which she continued her studies at UCLA and Otis-Parsons.

At nineteen, she married fellow art student, Forrest Staggs. Four children and eight years later, the marriage disintegrated and she asked her husband to find other quarters. At which point she took charge of running the family and continued to do her work and thrive as an artist.

The first formal recognition of her skill was given to her at the LOS ANGELES ALL CITY ARTS FESTIVAL where her work was hung in the WINNER'S CIRCLE and where she received a medal and a cash prize. Though reluctant to get caught up in the world of fine art competitions she did enter one more event and was again presented with a medal and cash prize from the DOWNEY ART MUSEUM.

Conventional wisdom most often suggests that it is doubtful to believe that one can make a living as a FINE ARTIST, and that one would be wise to have something more practical to offer in order to survive. However, having no other more useful skills, Sari plunged headlong into the world of art making without looking to the left or the right. Good teachers, an adventurous spirit, hard work, and a degree of good luck have supported her original ambition. From the beginning her work has been enthusiastically received and as a consequence hangs in many prestigious collections both here and abroad.

Steeped in the lore of the Native American culture, Staggs has allowed her own life philosophy to become entwined with theirs and has spent years representing the Native American people, their dwelling places and artifacts in her paintings. Of one such painting she states, "I had done many portraits of individual chiefs and wanted to do one of two chiefs together. I wanted one to be younger and the other to be slightly older. I wanted to make it seem as if they had an agreement between them. This particular painting came together rather quickly and the idea behind it seems to have worked." (See TWO CHIEFS in Gallery.)

Quote courtesy of Christine Mollring in her book written for the Erivan and Helga Haub family, COLLECTION OF WESTERN ART, volume one.

For most of her years as an artist Sari has worked in Watercolor. It has long been her wish to dispel the myth that watercolor is a difficult and unforgiving medium. To that end she teaches workshops in California, Wyoming and the South of France.

Source: https://www.saristaggs.com/about

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