Essay

With painting
I can’t make you see what I want you to see
When I try to enhance a particular face I see in the shapes and shadows
Others show themselves
If I highlight them all it will just be a mess
So it has to be done in layers
Gradual, with lots of noticing in between
Blurring of eyes
A gradient of attention
I have to leave it to the way your receptors arrange the image
So it becomes more about the feeling
Things connect in many places
unity is not one location,
it is every possible place.

I’ve always been an artist in one form or another, but I resisted my urge to paint for years. I was enthralled by it and terribly afraid of it at the same time.

I come from pencil drawings. I come from digital imagery and video editing. I come from dance, writing, and photography. I didn’t fully trust my hands. I didn’t trust my visual art skills without the computer’s help.

I’ve always had a sense that painting would obsess me if I started. I knew it would take a lot of hours to learn in order to get to a point where I could paint what I wanted to paint. But I desperately wanted to learn to create fully “analogue art” - just me, my hands and a palette of colours.

I love the dreaming process at the beginning, the emerging of a story, an idea, a memory, coming to life through an image. I started slow. I was learning to slow down. I was a city girl learning to live in the mountains. I was a mother coming back to her art. With kids finally both in school and the forest around me, I sat down to draw again.

I would sit outdoors every morning and scan my thoughts, my stories, or current world issues that struck me... the ones that repeated, the ones that were unbearable, or the ones I was inspired by.

Each day I would reduce this library of thoughts, connections, and emotions into a single, short phrase. Then I would draw that phrase in my sketchbook with no other agenda, no expectation of outcome. I just let the words show me their pictures.

I started with pencil and ink. Sometimes, a drawing took me 3 minutes, and some took three months. I’ve never formally trained as an artist beyond taking a few workshops. I went to Vancouver Film School for video editing production and graphic design. I didn’t know the artist’s tricks for perspective or depth or color theory or composition.

I did many drawings when I first came back to art in my 30s. I left many pieces unfinished. It didn’t matter. It was like a daily journal, I wasn’t sure I would “do anything” with any of them or “make something of myself” through them. These loose explorations led me to create my “Creativity Character” series. In a way, these drawings (images 1 through 7) are a timeline of my creative process, the steps I go through while navigating a piece. “In the beginning”, “On the other hand”, “Growing past doubt”, “Priority Paralysis”, “How to manage these wings”, “Shell, Mirror, Power”, “Queen of the World”.

I would sit on the beach and sketch intricate pencil drawings of these “characters”. I would scan the image into the computer and then layer the drawings with my photography to add interesting textures and colors. I loved the surprises, especially when I brought different images together and tried out different relationships between them, of color, opacity, contrast or concept.

The computer helped me to discover many possible outcomes for a piece, but in the end, it was all zeros and ones until I printed it out onto something material. I was frustrated with needing a computer to translate my creativity into the real world. Plus, I could lose it all in an instant if a power outage fried my machine. Also, my body hates sitting at the computer.

I surrendered to painting at the end of Dec 2019. I let myself play and discover in short bursts between taking care of the necessities of work and family and land.

In 2020 my world became very different, not only because of the pandemic. My father had been diagnosed with dementia a few years before and his illness was progressing quickly. My teenage daughter was in a deep struggle.

I found myself home-bound, unable to work or do anything away from home. I was deep in grief and that strange space of ambiguous loss.

I isolated myself in my studio and started painting every day. I took a couple of workshops online. I bought a 24x36 canvas and decided to paint a woman in a particular pose just to see if I could get her face and body to look somewhat “realistic”. Most of my illustrations had been more abstract-conceptual, not trying for real-life at all.

There was a lot going on in my life, internally, with family, with the world...as there was for everyone in 2020. I dove into my new painting “The Question” completely. (Image 8)

I worked on “The Question” everyday for at least 6 hrs a day for 3 months. I poured everything into it, cried over it, laughed a lot, gave up and kept going every 5 minutes some days. I danced with it, I examined it in the mirror to work out the larger shape and feel. I let it pull me into all the places that hurt, that celebrated, the places in me that were grateful, or frustrated and impatient, or scared, or simply in love with the moment. I’ve never experienced an art piece in quite this way.

During some painting sessions, I felt like I was saying everything I needed to say with each brushstroke, with each discovery of a new color combination, with every emergence of a new, surprising element. Painting “The Question” got me through the winter of 2020. I finished it on the spring Equinox.

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You think it’s about precision,
but you might just have to scrub things with a bit of water and pigment
until the mind can infer a new shape.

It could mean anything,
even though you already worked out the whole story.

It could be the sum total of your experiences so far, or it could be nothing but over-mixed paint
that you imagine is saying something.

It could be about your whole life or only these last few years.
It could just be about the softness
that comes after breaking.

You added so much detail,
like the news,
violent and provocative with contrast.

After a while, It became garnish
and made no sense,
so you had to blur the whole thing over again with pale violet,
as if it wasn’t true.

You do over all the parts you think you have finished
until they become awkward in their certainty.
Undoing your own efforts, over and over...
forcing softness in the right places,
or detail where none exists.

“You can never be too sure”. Isn’t that what reality wants? After-all.

Perhaps sometimes you need to be certain and draw a strong line,
so the world knows who you are.

Painting is like growing up,
you chase these perfections...
then you realize that your edges are all on display and will need to be softened.

You follow every possible time-line...
and after hours or years
it becomes a tangled mess.
You need to pull back,
or scrub everything down to match your failing eyesight
- start over.

Swaying between precision and a natural voice...
between deep meaning and the willingness to be wrong.

Accepting the fool within...the child that tries too hard...
the muse that enchants...

It could be art
or it could be nothingness.

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In the summer of 2021, I started painting “Witness” and “Suspension”. Fires were raging in the forests around us. The air was thick with smoke. In July, we were evacuated from our home because of a fire 2 km from our land.

All I took with me were my paintings, paints, computer, and a few clothes. I spent two weeks painting on my friend’s porch, watching the fire in the distance. I felt lost, like my reality was dissolving.

Not only was the valley burning and the air unbreathable, but my dad’s health was declining rapidly, and because of the pandemic, I was cut off from seeing him for some months.

The whole world had changed. I felt like as I was losing my dad, I was also losing the world we existed in together. All the things he valued were falling apart, and all his concerns about the world were coming to pass.... Environmental crisis, tech taking over our lives, a distancing between people, disconnection of self from place and others. The paintings in “44 Moons - Making Matter” were my way of processing the shifting universe. They were my way of speaking when I felt otherwise voiceless, powerless, and deeply lonely.

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I was ready to do something big but
Now I’m tired
The water is at my neck like a blade

There are mountains
Wanting to be climbed
But they are on fire
Again

They wait for footsteps
From shoes used to city streets
Soles, souls, solace in being known

For all I know home is underwater
Or burning
Who can tell

Either way ....
I’m Making matter
from some inner mythology

I could step
But here I am
floating

A world above
And so below
Barely touching

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“All we ever wanted” is the final piece in the series. I finished it just before my dad passed in March 2022. I was thinking about childhood dreams, about the deep inner knowing that children have, about fantasies of a future, about our need for connection, to others and to environment. I was feeling myself getting jaded and angry. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore except that I wanted to paint.

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All we ever wanted
was to live by the sea
A home
With a view to some shiny city
All we ever wanted was to be held
And shown the view
An open window looking upon...
Lights
And our creations
we were
building connections
From behind masks
Shrinking so small as to float away
All we ever wanted was to get there
So we did
Here we are
It’s all we ever wanted

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My dad’s dementia took away many of his words and his access to the past, but as these things dissolved, all his knowing of reality became concentrated into this truth, one he repeated over and over again in his last years:

“Reality is: The place you are in, who you are with, what you are doing together in that place - that’s reality,” he would say.

Making something matter means you chose to pay attention to something, you let it through all your filters and decided to explore it further. What part of us is talking, on any given day and how do we choose who to listen to?

What do we make matter as a result of giving our inner voices a creative outlet? We all have characters living inside us. When we let them, they take us to the room they inhabit in our brain and show us the view from there. They change what matters - what becomes - what is built and shared. They become reality.

In the year since my dad’s passing and with my daughter doing so much better, I have completed a very colorful, fun, and playful series called “Polar Opposites - Made of You”.

The series consists of 11 paintings, four of which I’ve posted here. (Images 12 through 20) In them, I pair together animals who come from very different places or who are opposites in form, size, energy or in how they move through the world.
While naming the individual pieces, I realized that despite their differences, these animal friends also have some element linking them together.

While painting these, I thought about the interconnectedness of all creatures, about how we’ve been taught that evolution is about competition and “survival of the fittest,” and how scientists have now discovered that in fact it is cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships that allow species to thrive. We learn from each other by recognizing the strengths in our diverse forms. This series is a celebration.

It is a return to child-like wonder. It has allowed me to feel playful again, while still feeding the part of my brain that wants to find meaning and connection in everything.

Through my art practice, I seek to evoke emotional resonance and serve as a mirror, prompting contemplation. My art invites the audience to embark on a transformative journey, exploring themes of identity, connection, and resilience. Within the spectrum of the human experience, we encounter the dichotomy of celebration and grief. In my art practice, I explore this paradox, weaving together threads of joy and sorrow to create a tapestry of emotions. Life’s triumphs and trials coexist, shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world.
www.sonjarueartist.com