One of Sonia’s favourite watercolourists is Thomas Girtin (1775-1802). She has always found his balance of composition and expressive energy very inspiring - especially now that Sonia herself is keen to balance the physicality of her work with the psychological resonance of its subject matter.
Interior-Exterior I is a sophisticated work which echoes some of the larger oil paintings in its grid-like central section. Mixing watercolour with impasto Sonia was able to build up a surface thick enough to incise into and, like the larger oil paintings, the subject matter is equally archetypal. Horses are shown in various horsey postures - being ridden, standing, mating, feeding. The attraction of the horse as subject matter lies in its domestic link to human beings. It elicits very general emotions in the viewer which are at the same time highly complex - a running horse might evoke the exhilaration of movement yet the presence of the rider complicates that more basic physical joy, suggesting constraint. The grid structure in which these various scenes are framed echoes that darker theme. At their most benign the grid- scenes suggest that life is lived through specific moments and events. We certainly experience our lives in this way. Yet the generality of these scenes, their archetypal impersonality, suggests that much of our experience, no matter how specific and individual it may seem to us, is part of an impersonal pattern or life cycle. Interior- Exterior I is a succinct presentation of the tension between the personal and the impersonal. This tension is echoed formally in the contrast between the watercolour impasto of the central grid section and the smoother watercolour washes from which the sky is composed.
Garden I is constructed around a similar tension of opposites. In this work the industrious, detailed life of the soil is presented against the looser sky with its larger, simpler pattern of weather. Sonia’s overall sense of design provides an underlying structure for the contrast between soil and sky, suggesting an underlying harmony rather than an unresolvable dualistic tension. This work is a succinct expression of
faith in the creative imagination’s ability to reconcile opposites and achieve resolution of conflict.
Sonia thinks of her recent paintings both as poems and as ‘built things’ (she jokingly compares herself to a plasterer). The mixture of poetic and builderly impulses is clearly apparent in Mountain Spring II . In this work compositional strength is fused completely with stillness and a sense of silence - as though a materially vast mountain landscape had been expressed through a Japanese haiku. The resulting stillness is engagingly potent and avoids whimsy or reductiveness. On a fundamental level the mountain spring has not been misrepresented. Compositional clarity and emotive content are perfectly aligned.
Sonia first became noticed in the 1960s. At that time her work was concerned with social injustice. She is still passionate in her belief in liberty. (She defines the great modernist painters such as Picasso and Matisse as liberators.) Since the 1990s
her work has, in one sense, returned to the themes of those paintings completed in the 1960s, but this time she is exploring the happier state of liberty rather than the unhappy state of oppression. In other words Sonia is approaching the same subject matter but from the other side. Her incised figures of running women and horse-riders balance the captive political prisoner lying gagged and bound in her 1966 painting
Bound Figure.
Like the development of modern western art in general Sonia’s progress has been a search for a new language with which to explore the same themes- liberty, happiness and loneliness.
