FAWC’s Artist Services Manager Sarah Dineen Meditates on One Shape

In 2020, Sarah Dineen unearthed a 19-square-foot painting that she had made as a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “I call it my adolescent painting,” she says. “It was an awkward-stage painting that just never worked.”

Yet the painting contained a shape that had been reappearing in her work for years. She talks about it now as a malleable image, at times suggesting a keyhole, a microphone, or a tree. She cut the shape out from the oversized canvas and found a path forward with it. Although once peripheral to her practice, the shape — a circle atop a vertical rectangle — has since become her dominant motif.

Dineen grew up in Brewster. She returned there in 2022 after living in Beverly and then in New York City for 12 years. In her Provincetown studio at the Fine Arts Work Center (where she started working in April as fellowship artist services manager), the walls are lined with large-scale paintings. The surfaces are dark and dense, and, in most of them, the keyhole shape dominates the center of the composition.

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