Sophie Carey Artist

My practice concentrates on a timeline of my life in recent times; battling bereavement, grief, PTSD and how it has shaped me today. My work is concentrated on raw emotion. When I’m creating, I listen to music that provokes emotion, I find when I’m not, I’m not connected to my paintings. I play songs that connect me to them so that my work is from the heart and created on raw emotion. I guess it’s my coping mechanism, my oxygen to breathe, the reason I’m still here today. Every piece of work I do is my therapy to feeling like I still have a purpose in life. My aim as an artist is to make you feel, it doesn’t matter what emotion it triggers as a viewer, the main purpose is that it is relatable to someone in some way. Not everybody can express their emotion through a creative outlet and that’s okay. My purpose is to give those people an outlet by engaging with my paintings and provoke feelings that were deeply buried.

I’ve got better with painting over the years through practice and patience, which has allowed me to find my own unique style. I’m an expressionist; I create gestural brush strokes and use a vibrant colour palette to emphasise emotion. I’m a figurative painter at heart, and it’s only this year I’ve used myself as a subject matter. My brush strokes create a sense of direction and show the speed of each mark-making; I’m moving with the body. My work is meant to be viewed from a distance, and then as you get closer to the painting you see unperfected, fluid, controlled brush strokes that create a sense of movement. I want an audience to feel my painting, feel the heartache, pain and anger that comes in waves. Each painting is a different day, battling different emotions throughout. I keep all my paintings vibrant with a neutral background; I want a viewer’s eye to be concentrated on the body.