Earlier this year I launched my Sonder collection. If you’re looking for a small painting for your gallery wall or a framed piece of art as a highlight in a bijoux room in your home then you might find something among this collection.
I wanted to explore intuitive landscape and the resutls are an eclectic mixture of fragments of memory and imagination.
Why Sonder? Originally I was going to call my collection Wanderlust after a painting in my abstract shop from last year. Strangely, when I stumbled across the word Sonder I read a different definition the one below that I can no longer find, which speaks far more about the unrealised human interconnection. It’s the connection to the invisible that inspires me, the complexity and mystery of the earth and beyond.
In the same way that we can never truly know the fullness of someone else’s experience; we can never know or be everywhere; all we can do is appreciate the wonder of it all and explore if we’re called to. Through this, we share a grounding human connection - each time you’re looking at the stars probably thousands of people are doing the same. We are never alone and have a spiritual, primal connection to the landscape and the worlds beyond; our ancestors, everyone alive and those who come after us. There are threads of experience that bind us - even if the lands we inhabit are vastly different. I imagine that the more you experience those differences the more you feel the similarities. In moments of melancholy, you can find the greatest hope. My interpretation of Sonder is a loose one and went beyond this world. I think what’s so appealing about working in a more intuitive way is this bringing forth, a revealing of what’s under the surface and buried memories. It can be frustrating - oh the time’s I’ve painted over things! You can disappoint yourself one minute and amaze yourself the next, and touch the life of someone else.
sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
You can hear me speak briefly about this here and view the collection here.