Image by @gracecoffmanphoto

Sloane darling, the artist

Sloane Wolfe Terry (SloaneDarling) has a BFA from the University of Utah's Fine Art program. She moved to the Pacific Northwest to pursue her career in art, and to be in a place more conducive to her personal exploration and growth. Sloane participates in various local art shows/events, and sells her original work, as well as an array of other products made from her work, at dark arts markets locally and beyond. In 2020, she began her tattoo journey via tattoo school and became a fully licensed tattoo artist in 2022. Sloane is currently tattooing at Wandering Triumph Tattoo in NE Portland, OR.

Creating art has been her passion and goal in life ever since she was a small child, and Sloane continues to work hard to develop her natural talent and learned skills. Her top tools of choice are pen and ink, watercolor, graphite, colored pencils, charcoal, printmaking, and recently digital. She works illustratively, but also loves to work with gestural and painterly aesthetics to create a surrealist-realism effect.

Inspiration

I am strongly led by my sensations and emotions; I often understand first through abstract feeling, rather than conscious thought. My creative process is a way of blending the two together – feelings and thoughts – to achieve a greater understanding of myself and the world as I perceive it. Some recurring themes in my work deal with introspection, dualities, esoteric symbolism, dreamscapes, complex emotions, catharsis, tangibility, patterns and textures. I'm also a huge lover of people-watching and urban sketching.

As an artist, I use textured mark-making to build forms and create figures that are reminiscent of realism yet are highly-stylized, while also creating an atmospheric emotional energy for the viewer. I commonly utilize the human figure as my main subject matter, often adding other elements of nature in such a way as to evoke a surreal, otherworldly, or nostalgic experience. My primary mediums I work with are pen and ink, watercolor, graphite, and colored pencil. I commonly work in high-contrast monochromatic or limited-pallets. My main goal for my art is to achieve catharsis for myself through the creative process, as well as to assist the viewer in achieving their own levels of emotional understanding and connectedness with themselves and those around them. I believe art is a powerful tool for emotional release and creating the experiences of our realities, and should be readily accessable to everyone.