A Little Grey Bird

Sarah Lynne Hunter

Sarah Lynne Hunter is a multi-disciplinary artist who believes that art saves and changes lives. Her work revolves around a studio practice of creating narrative-based, pop-surreal oil and acrylic paintings that explore mental health, as well as a public practice of weaving art into her community through commissions and collaborative art. She has a degree in Apparel Design and Fine Art from Seattle Pacific University, and is based in Vancouver, WA where she lives with her family and teaches art classes and workshops out of her studio.

Her art has been exhibited in many galleries throughout the west coast including in Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and LA. She has fulfilled artwork and mural commissions for both public and private clients, most notably Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries and Clark County Juvenile Court, and was a recipient of The Imagination Project grant in 2022 via Wacom PDX and a 2023 recipient of Artist Trust’s Grants for Artist Progress. She is also a 2024 recipient of a Culture, Arts, & Heritage Grant from the city of Vancouver, WA, and has been juried into Clark County Open Studios from 2023-2025. Her primary medium is oil painting, but she also has experience working in acrylic, chalk pastel, colored pencil, charcoal, graphite, alcohol inks, conte crayon, watercolor, metal and fiber arts, and as a muralist.

She believes in the power of art to bring diverse groups together, unite communities, and its ability to empower and inspire. At its best, public art is a symbiotic dialogue between an artist’s creativity and a community’s spirit. In her mural work she seeks to be a visual storyteller; balancing whimsy and bold color with realism and recognizable motifs so viewers feel both inspired and included.

As counterpart to her public work, her studio work explores themes of femininity and mental health through a figurative lens with elements of surrealism and modern expressionism, and she often includes personal imagery and narratives within her work. She is inspired by trying to capture what words alone cannot– things that beg to be expressed but cannot be easily parsed. She captures emotions and experiences with color, composition, and blurring the lines between reality and our inner worlds and imaginings. She believes that personal expression through art can be a very meaningful and healing form of therapy and that putting imagery to some of the mental health struggles that many face offers a form of collective healing.