Artist Sara Steele is widely recognized for her dramatic watercolors of flowers, vivid still lifes, expansive abstractions, and ethereal landscapes. In the summer of 2005, the artist will celebrate thirty years of painting with a mid-career retrospective hosted by the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art. Sara Steele, Blueprints for Paradise accompanies the exhibition.

In addition to serving as the catalog for the retrospective, the book includes an extended survey of Ms. Steele’s work covering some 250 paintings. It also introduces the artist and explores her work through an extended interview, a biographical sketch, and in essays that examine the influence of Chinese thought on Ms. Steele’s work, consider the natural world in relation to her paintings, and discuss how Ms. Steele’s paintings come into being.

"In the presence of work by Sara Steele, it is difficult to move away," writes Anne Mugler. "The color and form allow our eyes little choice but to train their sight on her paintings. We are startled by and drawn into the vision in front of us."

About the Artist

Born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1954, Sara Steele now lives in the house her grandparents owned in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her paintings have been featured in more than fifty solo exhibitions. She has led workshops around the U.S. that extend in subject from an introduction to painting for school children to painting as a therapeutic art for hospitalized patients. She frequently contributes her work to serve on behalf of the natural world and the people who inhabit it. Organizations that have benefitted from her work include: the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy, Action AIDS, Living Beyond Breast Cancer, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, National Women’s Studies Association, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

10.5 by 9 inches
224 pages, full color
Softcover: $25
Hardcover: $35 (this option available at checkout)

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