Sophie Thervil - Personal Statement

My paintings capture fleeting and overlooked moments that I suspend through highly realistic oil paintings.  Relying on my own visual perception, cultural codes and mother's judgments, each painting has been a projection of myself through someone else. My portraits of strangers and friends have become a reflection of society’s expectations, cultural codes, and starting the conversations of semiotics through bad trans-stamps and red cowboy boots.

   

 Through exaggerated scale, the viewer is allowed to fully enter each painting, taking note of small yet important details. After developing my own staged photographs, thin layers of oil paint are carefully and sensitively applied. I think about painting objects as they feel to the touch and sight; the translucent quality of sparkling tights, the grittiness of a brown paper bag. Within recent paintings, I allow for the treatment of the whole canvas to vary. I apply more time-consuming detail to one area, areas in which I want the viewer to ponder on, while in others my painterly touch shows through. I crop each painting with extreme care and thought, to leave just the right amount of information on who these people are. When facial features are removed, bodily figures develop at a higher stake. Race, gender, and age inevitably become ambiguous, allowing the viewer to make their own assumptions.

 

I waver with changing known signifiers within certain paintings. These moments can be large, such as what happens when the basketball jersey isn’t real or small, such as slight color changes in recognizable graphics. My paintings are striving to decode symbols and personal objects in the 21st century that have become so easily overlooked.

 

Throughout my work, I explore how my perception of clothing, objects, and personal style reveals my own biases. Striving to continuously create a dialogue around different objects and symbols, these paintings also become vulnerable in my judgments of class, race, and assumptions. As a mixed race, yet white passing, female, I find myself questioning how brief moments can sway someone's perception of another’s identity. The changes in our day-to-day appearance tell a larger narrative of who we are or who we could be.