I am a South African-born and raised artist, now living in beautiful Oxfordshire. What do I love painting the most? The answer is quite simple: PORTRAITS! My gallery is filled with portraits of African-inspired women and women in general. I feel that women have harder lives than men, certainly in Africa, where I come from. They work twice as hard as men and their bodies go through so much with pregnancy and birth, carrying children and hard manual labour too. Women are strong and I feel I can identify with them in a way I don’t so much with men. Whether it be in oils or in pastels, I enjoy carving out a personality in a portrait, layer by layer, and to make it come alive. And yet, although each person has a whole lifetime of stories to tell, in each painting or pastel drawing I am purely capturing a single moment, a snapshot, a look or a the way a shaft of light falls. Diving into the complexities of a face and obsessing over details gives me an immediate emotional connection to the subject I am trying to capture. This is especially important when I work on commissions, which I so enjoy!

While my gallery is filled with mostly portraits of African-inspired women and women in general, my garage/studio is also a comfortable, cozy hessian-covered space to wander and enjoy a colour-feast of still life, landscape and wildlife paintings both in oils and pastels.
I live on the Ladygrove and I have ample parking and a cup of coffee ready for you!

I am always available for commissioned work. You can contact me:
barbersabine@gmail.com
07904 216700

or follow me on
https://www.instagram.com/beebarbartist/
https://www.facebook.com/ARTsabine