Painter Sarah Godsill has spent three years blending into the scenery to capture life at a Somerset theatre – and is now revealing all, writes John Hudson

T he Merlin Theatre in Frome is a busy local facility, on the campus of a comprehensive school that specialises in media arts. It's a working building without any airs and graces.

Yet for the Somerset painter Sarah Godsill, who has been a fly on the wall there for much of the past three years, it is a great deal more than that.

"To me, there's something very magical about theatres," she says. "Perhaps it's all the creative energy and emotion they've been part of over the years.

"You could say that in that way they're akin to churches, but for me they're more mesmerising and special than anywhere else."

Sarah has poured all the creative energy of her own into some 30 oil paintings and drawings, which are on show at Black Swan Arts in Frome until July 12.

They follow life at the Merlin from autumn 2006 until this year, though she had to take time off for part of that period for family reasons.

All theatre life is there – backstage, front of house, rehearsals and workshops, the audience, the big night, the dimming of the lights...

It's a virtuoso show of contrasting emotions, all captured by an artist who, as the months went by, took delight in soaking up everything that was going on and simply merging in with the scenery.

"My paintings come mainly from my sketchbooks," she says. "I did take photographs, but I'm heavily into sketches. I hope there will be room for some of them at the exhibition.

The 240-seat Merlin is a professional theatre in every sense, but Sarah's work has inevitably been more concerned with local amateur players, with their weeks of rehearsal and week-long shows, rather than the touring companies that constantly come and go with their one-nighters.

She's also been able to watch at close quarters the Mark Bruce Dance Company, which rehearses at the Merlin, and the theatre's affiliated artist Pip Utton, the Frome-based solo show specialist whose portrayals of everyone from Chaplin to Hitler are enjoyed all over the country.

"I really feel like part of the team when I'm working, though one I hope will be invisible," says Sarah, a Surrey girl who always knew that drawing and painting were her thing. She trained in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the late Eighties.

Her paintings bring to mind the work of several artists known for their backstage scenes, Degas, Walter Sickert and Laura Knight among them.

A study of a half-filled Merlin auditorium, with its blood-red seats and shadowy walls, is so Sickert-influenced that you're almost scanning the audience for Jack the Ripper.

And Sarah's scene from Frome Drama Club's 2008 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, with four tough guys playing cards around a table, has reminded onlookers of everyone from Caravaggio for its shadowed faces, to Edward Hopper for its bleak loneliness, and van Gogh for its palette.

It seems a bit infra-dig to mention Jack Vettriano in such august company, but whisper it not, some people have seen him in there somewhere, too.

Not that Sarah or almost any other artist on the planet would mind making Jack's kind of money from their work.

She particularly enjoyed the theatre company's three Christmas shows in her time there, Sleeping Beauty, The Snow Queen and The Wizard of Oz, and her swan-song in the project – which has been part-funded by the Arts Council – has been sketching rehearsals for next month's production of West Side Story.

A joint venture between the theatre and its talented young neighbours from Frome Community College, it runs for three nights from July 15 to 17, and it's one occasion when the fly on the wall longs to turn into a butterfly.

"I'd have loved to be in that show," Sarah says. "I'm so jealous of everyone in it. They all seem to be having such a good time."

It's the escape from the isolation of working in a studio that has been one of the great joys of the Merlin project for her, though her "day job" as an artist also has its glamorous moments.

She specialises in sketching weddings, going through the day from the arrival of the bride – or even her preparations at home – to the party in the evening.

The result is a portfolio of a dozen or so coloured illustrations of the great day, which do not pretend to take the place of photographs but clearly become treasured mementoes, if feedback from delighted brides, grooms and brides' mums is to be believed. "I've been all over the country doing this work, and again it's just a case of melting into the background and putting down what I see," Sarah says.

"Sometimes it's simply capturing a fleeting moment. But in some places where photography is banned it's more than that, it's a case of recording a key moment for posterity.

"It's not an easy day from my point of view, though there are compensations. I have to say no to the champagne but they feed me well!"

Portrait painting was Sarah's first love. "She has the incredible knack of being able to capture people and their features perfectly," says the Merlin's theatre director, Paula Hammond.

And in some of the wedding sketches, that's a feat she achieves in just a few deft lines.

Beyond the Sightlines, paintings and drawings by Sarah Godsill, can be seen at Black Swan Arts, Bridge Street, Frome until July 12, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, admission free.