Sonya Ziegler

Born in Windsor, Canada in 1965, Sonya Ziegler’s family moved to Los Angeles when she was 5 years old, then a few years later to the Bay Area in California. In 1989 Sonya moved to Jackson, CA and has been in the Sierra Nevada foothill area for over 22 years. She also maintains a studio in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Sonya was a solitary, sensitive, and shy child and teenager, preferring to be alone with her books, art, animals and music. She would draw and paint incessantly, and daydream about a world more gentle and beautiful. She always felt like an outsider—that she didn’t really fit in anywhere. Art became Ziegler’s refuge from the harsh realities, unjustness, and stresses of life that seemed to encroach faster than she could come to terms with.

During college, in the mid-1980’s, Sonya had the good fortune to take an art class taught by the late Eileen Gilbert-Hill. She was very active in the Bay Area art scene, and she taught Sonya that there were all kinds of ways to “make” art…painting wasn’t just about copying what she saw in front of her. Real art, creative art, begins and ends with the imagination. Ziegler learned the fundamental rudiments of drawing and painting, but when she reached a certain technical level she was no longer content to work in a formulized style of representational painting. Anyone can copy, but a true artist has fire in the soul, a desire and passion to “imagine” and inject the work with his/her own memory, feelings, logic, and intelligence.

In addition to loving all things creative, Sonya also has a penchant for vegan cooking, veterinary and human medicine, biology, reading, organic gardening, music, and being outdoors. She is an advocate for animal welfare and donates heavily to various animal rights organizations across the United States.

Artist Statement:

I have always been fascinated by the mysteries of nature; her work flowing, waxing and waning as the seasons change—as earth evolves, responding and adapting to trial and tribulations. I see myself in a mirror image, my work molding to more informed and tempered feelings, intellect, passions and introspection.

Whether I work in oil or mixed media, I employ several different techniques to get the rich surface texture that I like, including wet-in-wet, sanding, impasto, dry brush, layering and sgraffito. I am careful to observe that every silent record of the construction of a painting and it’s creative process—the rich surface influencing the emotion of the finished work. I am a process painter; I am not looking to tell a story with my work, nor do I have a set goal when starting. I add and subtract by layers until the composition and color feel balanced. This can take hours, days, weeks or months, until I feel satisfied that the piece is finished. Painting is the best way for me to express my visions, thoughts and desires—my goal being to instill a sense of the largeness of life, the glorious mysteries of nature, and the bittersweet beauty of our remembered pasts and the world around us.

I tend to work in series, extracting what I need and then moving on. I am constantly looking for ways to grow, never satisfied with staying moored to the shore. I am influenced by nature, my intellect, and the strong emotional memories of my past; as thoughts are remembered, I endeavor to make sense of life and the world around me, seeking to put the illogical into a cohesive framework. This is my mark-making, where I am free to create harmonious orderliness out of the chaos of life. I am compelled to look deeper, and to make connections with paths crossed long ago.

A sampling of Sonya’s work at Petroglyphe Gallery (click any image to enlarge and scroll through)