SARAH GU?STEN-MARR is like her artwork. A one-off.

"I get so much pressure to make prints but I'm not going to do that," says the African-German artist in the sitting room of her rural idyll at Dykelands Farm, Whenby, near York. "That's the whole point. I'm an artist, I do individual pieces. I'm not going to repeat myself. I'm not doing prints."

Sarah has lived the international life before settling, post-divorce from Yorkshireman Alexander Marr, in a smallholding in the Vale of York, where she raises her family of Rolf and Josephine, paints, breeds Highland cattle in her fields and provides clothes and African accessories for fashion shoots and the ideal location for interiors photographic sessions.

With the building skills of her "Yorkshire crew", she has created a dance studio, her own pub tap room called The Flute and Stiletto and a sauna, but more importantly one barn now houses her studio and a gallery, Gallery GM, named after the initials of her surname.

To arrive at this point, Sarah has experienced an extraordinary life. Born in Liberia, West Africa, one of the poorest countries on earth and torn apart by years of civil war, she was adopted by her German parents when her biological mother died in childbirth.

Her father's banking work took her all over the world with her family, from the Cote d'Ivoire to Rome and the United States and consequently she is fluent in German and Italian as well as English.

She came to Yorkshire many years ago, and in the wake of her divorce, Dykelands Farm represented the artistic haven she could combine her own art-making with running a gallery. The first exhibition, opened in grand style with a champagne and canapés party and friends arriving from New York and Germany, features 15 new and original works by Sarah that reflect her love of the Tropics, New York and her recent trip to South Africa, where she became one of a select group of artists to paint an almost life-sized ceramic rhino in aid of the My Rhino conservation initiative.

The invitation to South Africa came after Sarah's debut show at Gallery 27 in London's Cork Street last September, and many of her textural, contemporary pieces are now in private art collections around the world.

She is at present preparing for her next London exhibition in Mayfair in August and towards the end of the year, she will return to South Africa to stage her first show on the African continent, in Cape Town. Not that Africa is ever far from her ; you can see it in her decor, her choice of colours in her paintings and the signature colourful dresses she wears, even when painting, often made from fabric found in her native West Africa.

The resulting work can be seen in Gallery GM, a gallery that does not have official opening times but requires you to contact Sarah in advance on 0777 585 1057 to arrange a viewing time, but is certainly worth the trip to such a beautiful setting and to see art displayed in the best lighting.

What's more, Sarah will not be exhibiting only her own work but has plans to run a student competition with a top prize of £700 to encourage new talent. Watch this space for more details on those plans as they develop.

She recalls her own fledgling days as a student artist at the Winchester School of Art. "I was very impressionable," she says. "I was painting a lot in red, because red is the colour of life; the colour of blood; the colour of passion; the colour of love; the colour of anger, and I have all those cultures in me."

Indeed she does and so does her artwork.