Sarah was also a much in-demand portrait painter. Her portraits of Clive James (1991) and The Guardian Women (1993-94) are in the National Portrait Gallery. The Marlborough exhibition contains many portraits, including the haunting Joe and the Freak (1985), as well as a charming sketch of her father (Fred, 1997). Sarah didn't paint her parents much. "She didn't want us to get old. She wanted us to stay young, and that way she would stay young. She wanted us all to be frozen in time. Sarah had a fear of death. She didn't want us to die." With a pained look, he pauses. "As usual with God and his curious ways, it wasn't we who died on that occasion." 

Frederic talks about Sarah's Jewishness. She did a sequence of drawings called Pyndyat (1990), which are "responses to Russian anti-Semitism". Frederic recalls how the nun and art critic Sister Wendy Beckett wrote an article on Sarah's painting The Villagers (1990) claming that "it was a Christian painting and Sarah was extremely displeased...and wrote to her and to anybody else who would listen that she had nothing to do with Christianity and that the woman should stop being so intuitive and actually look at the work rather than impose her own imprint on it." 

Sarah suffered from terrible migraines. "She loved life", but "the pain became very great and she did sort of, in the end, become over-borne by the pain, at least when it was hurting." She became dependent on the morphine-based drug pethidine. This led to a battle with addiction that resulted in a long spell in the Priory Hospital, London. "You have to understand that Sarah was married when she was 23, she had children, and we were there when we were wanted, but we were careful not to be there when we weren't wanted. In other words, I don't think we entirely knew what was going on. And quite candidly, I don't see why we should have." Frederic gently implies that she was too enthusiastically prescribed drugs to treat her migraines, but he acknowledges: "There was a recklessness about her. Byron said that no one had ever lived faster than he did, but Sarah made a pretty good shot at it." To emphasise this, he lists her vast output, three children, and, with a resigned sigh, "pain". 

In the last years of her life, when she had really bad migraine attacks, she struggled to paint. This is why she created the Strip! paintings, since she could do a little bit and then resume work again, which wasn't possible with her larger oil paintings. The outcome is original and sublime artwork. Indeed, her art teacher from Camberwell School of Arts went so far as to say: "If this work is the result of the migraines, then I can't be sorry that you have them."

Frederic recalls one occasion "when Sarah was taking whatever she was taking, and in the middle of the night, fell down a very long flight of stairs. We were phoned at three in the morning, she'd been taken to hospital. This was three or four years before she died." He and Beetle thought it "was the worst that was going to happen, but it wasn't. That's why I mention that story. She fell off roofs, terraces, she did all kinds of stuff, and she was OK. So in a way, we thought nothing was going to happen."

Sarah died after contracting pneumonia in January 2001. She had called an ambulance after taking her daughters to school and was admitted to hospital as an emergency. Abscesses developed on the lung, and she died of septicaemic shock.