Specialising in painting intuitively, Sonia works from her home studio in Te Awanga, Hawkes Bay. She explores colours and many layers that take themselves in their own direction. This free, process-driven approach is about the painting journey rather than always following a theme. “I trust intuition to find balance, to find a composition that will eventually work. It is about letting go and allowing the painting to take on a life and a meaning of its own. And there has to be colour – I want people to experience some crazy, beautiful colour happiness.”
Inspiration comes from many sources, usually from the natural world. Swallows dipping and diving over sand dunes at dusk, light thrown over a curling leaf. “These moments and colours stay with me until eventually they emerge in a painting. There’s a moment between being awake and falling asleep when the idea of a painting often emerges with crystal sharp clarity and an energy of its own.”
Increasingly, her work explores colour both opaque and translucent, starting points and boundaries blurred, layers woven together. Shapes move between abstract and realistic - symbolising the constant shift between order and chaos and the inability of one to exist without the other. The delicate balance and interconnection of all.
Sonia sells her work privately and through various NZ galleries.
