SONDER: the stranger’s series
“The Realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own - 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.”
(The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
This body of work portrays people that I don’t know captured in a single moment of their life that I share with them. I struggle with initial conversations with strangers, but when I paint someone, I get to know then in a more personal way. The painting is a first conversation with someone in a format that I understand and feel confident in: I now know the passerby in an artistic, colorful way. When I paint people who pass me on the street, there is no posing, no time to get ready, and no ability to hide the uncomfortable. It is an authentic first meeting. I am often over-whelmed by thoughts of sonder.
For a moment my experience overlaps with the subject’s. I created one very large panel because I wanted the painting’s size to overwhelm the viewer and make the feeling of sonder more potent. I use colorful pigments to energize the pieces alnog the way with more candid blurry photos.
I have more liberty with these imperfect images because it becomes less about capturing a perfect likeness and more about the emotion of the moment.
