Sarah Boisvert Paints What's Just Under the Surface

Boisvert's path into art ran straight through medicine. After nearly a decade working as a travel nurse — a career that moved her from city to city — she stepped away to paint full time, a decision she has said she made at her doctor's recommendation, for her overall well-being and safety. One of those nursing assignments is what first brought her to Austin, the city she ended up calling home (and, as she tells it, where she met her now-husband). It's a backstory that helps explain the emotional pressure behind the paintings: this is a practice she came to deliberately, as the thing she actually wanted to be doing.

Boisvert combines abstraction and figuration, drawing on personal references, experiences, and memories to make what she calls thoroughly expressive paintings. The human figure is present in much of the work — but she has moved away from portraiture with distinguishable faces, painting with a specific subject in mind and then processing it through her own interpretation rather than rendering a likeness. The result reads as a record of feeling more than a record of a face: figures that hold a posture, a mood, an isolation, without resolving into a named person.

She freehands all of her paintings, working without a fixed plan and, in her words, letting her brushes decide the next stroke for her. The early work leaned into themes of identity and urban alienation, carried by a strong command of color, composition, and gradient set against bolder abstract marks.

Part of what makes a Boisvert painting feel alive up close is how much is happening on the surface. Her work is typically built on stretched canvas and layers in printed images of vintage media, acrylics, spray paint, metal flake, textiles, and other mixed mediums — a deep, tactile build that rewards looking at the actual object rather than a screen. She names Jean-Michel Basquiat as her main influence, and you can feel that lineage in the way raw mark-making, found imagery, and color collide on the canvas without being smoothed over.

Boisvert's recent work has widened in a way worth following. Alongside the urban-isolation paintings, she has been making pieces that mine the American West — including Portal to the West, inspired by West Texas landscapes and the twilight transition from day into night. In some of this newer work she sets the classic Western frontier against extraterrestrial and unexplained imagery, using UFO motifs to push at frontier loneliness and the possibility of encounters beyond human comprehension. As she puts it: "I like the juxtaposition of the classic Western theme with the extra terrestrials and unexplained encounters to amplify the mystery and wonder, suggesting that the West still holds many unexplored secrets." It's the same instinct that drives the figurative work — a search for what's just under the surface — pointed at a bigger, stranger landscape.

Boisvert is also a milliner. Alongside the paintings she produces women's and men's hats in classic styles meant to complement modern dress — each one handmade using traditional millinery techniques, with an emphasis on detailed construction and fine materials. It's a fitting second discipline for a painter so attentive to surface, texture, and made-by-hand craft: two practices, one sensibility.

The paintings reward seeing in person, where the metal flake catches light and the layered media reads as built rather than printed. Online, Boisvert is active on Instagram at @beinspiredabstracts and @sarahboisvertdesign. Her work is carried by Austin Art Garage, an Austin gallery focused on original work by local artists, and she's a member of the atxgals collective. To see the work at full scale, catch her on the Austin Studio Tour, where she has shown at The Cathedral — a renovated 1930s church turned studio space in East Austin.

About this spotlight: an independent, unpaid feature, written because we admire the work — drawn from Sarah's own public statements and her galleries' published material. All artwork and images are the artist's; see the work in full via the links above. Sources: her profile at atxgals, Austin Art Garage, the Austin Studio Tour, and Austin Woman magazine.