Sarah Raskino

When Sarah Raskino moved to Whitstable and found herself with a little spare time, she wanted to rediscover her creative side. She had loved painting at A level, but a degree and a career in fashion design had pulled her toward the increasingly technical, with little room to make things purely for the pleasure of it. Four years of classes later, she paints with real confidence and a growing appetite for experiment.
She works in oils, painting the people and places she loves, above all her Labrador, Lola, on her walks around Kent. The thing she is still working on is letting go: loosening the pull toward realism that her old career trained into her, and finding more freedom and fluidity in the way she captures a subject.
She loves the Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionists, and is drawn to any painting that uses colour in a confident, expressive way. Her favourite piece of her own came almost by accident. With fifteen minutes of class left and a painting already finished, she found herself with a loaded palette and nothing to use it on, so she took a palette knife and quickly scraped the leftover paint onto a rough sheet of paper, catching the shades of her dog. It turned out to be the best thing she'd made.