Art Hound

I’ve had a longtime artist crush on Sofia Arnold so it’s a thrill to be kicking off her show today on Buy Some Damn Art. Sofia is one of those artists whose work completely stands on its own; viewing her work feels like stepping into another world, the singular inner world of the artist’s imagination.

 Found The Rat

SOFIA:  I grew up in rural Wisconsin and now I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Looking For The Rat

KATE:  When did you start making art?

SOFIA:  I’ve always made things, but I didn’t get serious about making art until my third year of college.

New Shit/ Old Shit

KATE:  Your paintings provide a hard-to-decipher narrative of the private lives of the figures within. Do these figures have names and lives and stories to tell?

SOFIA:  Of course! Although their lives and struggles are probably more mundane and familiar than you would think.

Moth Box

KATE:  Do you have another job? If so do the two compliment each other at all?

SOFIA:  I work for a car manufacturer, administering production line simulations. It provides me with structure and forces me to operate outside of my own mind on a regular basis, but it couldn’t be further from art.

SOFIA:  The evolution that happens when recycling old ideas and imagery. A copy of a copy of a copy might become visually unrecognizable from the source, but I think that continued reiteration will eventually distill some kind of meaning for me. I’ve only been doing this for about five years and it’s already starting to happen. It’s exciting to think that I can keep doing this until my fingers fall off.

Sofia Arnold is an artist I’d love to see more of. While I am a big fan of her paintings, I’m just loving these new pieces in colored pencil & nail polish (!). Sofia’s imperfect, gestural drawings are lighthearted and lovely.

Sofia’s work from 2011 as it appears on her website.

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New work by an old artist crush: Wisconsin-based Sofia Arnold. Her paintings are so detailed and lush that it’s very challenging to get them into blog-form without hacking them to death and either losing the details or the context. I imagine they look 10 times better in person than they do here.

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I have a big crush on Wisconsin-artist Sofia Arnold, whose darling, moody paintings I find captivating. The subtle details in Sofia’s paintings, such as delicate textures or layers of dark tones, are amazing, and I’m doing my best to blow up these photos to give you a sense for what’s there. Much to Sofia’s credit, she has great detail shots of her paintings on Facebook.

Looking at Sofia’s work, I can’t help but see similarities to other artists I love (Betsy Walton and Katy Horan are the two that are top of mind). I also see influences of the Fauve painters, especially Matisse and Gaugin in Sofia’s work…the dreamscapes, the tableaux of people, creatures and plants, and the way everything in the paintings (hills, shadows, leaves) is abstracted into textures and patterns. And the spiritual element in Sofia’s paintings, which is hard to quite nail down, is wrapped into a larger narrative much like both Walton and Horan’s paintings.

Sofia is currently showing at Tory Folliard Gallery in Madison, WI through Feb 6th. Update: Sofia’s pieces at Tory Folliard are modestly priced from $300-$850. Thanks for MLFY for the original link.