She’s skulking through dark streets photographing buildings for inspiration for her oil paintings. These low-quality snapshots help her recreate a story of the rural America that she loves.

Occasionally, she gets taken down to the police station on her quest to capture images of her subjects. But usually, in her small hometown of Brookfield, Missouri — where she photographs most often — they recognize that she’s on a mission.

“I’m working from these terrible little snapshots that I take, and I love for them to be bad because it makes me be inventive,” Williams said.

From these resource shots, she knows the shape of the building and location of the light source, but she adds in detail and color — color is her passion — to showcase these buildings’ unique structures.

“I’m just really fascinated with how you can indicate the way of life, or someone’s existence or personality, through the way they’ve built whatever it is they use.”

Coping with homesickness through painting

Growing up in rural Missouri has influenced Williams’ art.

After moving to the Dallas metro area for her graduate work, she began taking photos on her home visits and putting this inspiration on the canvas.

“I was having this crisis because I didn’t recognize anything, and I’ve always grown up in a small area where I could go by landmarks. … I completely lost my sense of place.”

Through her paintings, she started to share the uniqueness and slower pace of the rural way of life, sometimes through an abandoned highway or a dark night sky against an aging industrial building.

Recently, she’s begun incorporating more residential settings into her work and experimenting with the feeling of voyeurism. She’s trying to capture the feeling that the viewer is standing on the sidewalk staring at the houses to see what is visible inside.

“I’ve got this series of small houses with big picture windows, and you can see the giant TVs glowing through the windows, so there’s that acidic artificial light that’s happening.”

Shows coming up around the nation in 2015, 2016

For a young artist, Williams has received a lot of recognition for her body of work.

Her oil paintings were displayed at the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming, in spring 2014, and
she showed at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, where she taught a course called Weekend in the Wild that took students to Yellowstone.

In February 2015, she had her largest solo show to date in Houston, Texas, at the McMurtrey Gallery where she showed more than 30 pieces.

She also was selected for a solo show at the George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles in September 2015, and will have one at the Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas in January 2016.

Creating art on aisle five

Open-air paintings are often created in a serene location that results in paintings of landscapes, but as a student, Sarah Williams did a series of open-air paintings in the aisles of her hometown Wal-Mart. She remembers being met with questioning glances.

“I was in the middle of this culture with everybody doing their shopping, painting from observation – the light on the linoleum, the displays, or the bananas were $1.60.”

View her selected works