An appreciation of Sonia Bublaitis’s work by Dave Phillips Figure 1. Right: Bouquet (2012) mixed media on Perspex 50 x 50cm Figure 2. Below: Nature’s Energies (2014) mixed media on Perspex 50 x 100cm
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here has she come from is the first question you ask? One understands she has dabbled in art as a child and her mother is a talented artist. Yet, it seems she has appeared magically in the last ten years, in which she went to Warwickshire College on a Fine Art course. Now, it seems she cannot live without making art in various guises. Not only that but her work is becoming known in national circles, with an appearance in the contemporary exhibition Flux. There is no stopping her now. She has zoomed
her way into national consciousness, as well as that of the local scene, with such works as Bouquet (Fig. 1). What then does her work offer the viewer? Jubilation is a word, which goes a long way to an understanding of Sonia’s painting. Drops of pure colour costume the surface of her paintings on Perspex, often forming constellations, glittering in their tactile splendour, as in Nature Energies (Fig. 2), where maybe a fragment of the sun is hurtling across the abyss in a ferocious and threatening way. In addition her photographic artefacts
probe into the phantasmagorical, such as Healing Hands (Fig. 3), so all you see is dissolving forms that conjure up a world of possibilities. What though do they say, what do they mean, what is the message and what the thinking? Here we move into the metaphysical, as in the Italian Pittura Metafiscia (1917), Abstraction Lyrique (1947), Abstract Expressionism (early 1940s) and many other such groupings, to include Kandinsky’s writings and those of Mondrian, with his interest in Theosophy in the early years of the 20th century.