She's the Artist She Wanted to Become and Nowhere Near Finished

She’s the Artist She Wanted to Become and Nowhere Near Finished

At 26, Sofia Zubi has found success in different mediums and geographies. Her secret is a lot of color and curiosity.

MANALAPAN, New Jersey – After walking her dog on a still-cold Spring morning, Sofia Zubi returned home alone, but not lonely. In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic necessitating stay-at-home orders for millions, Sofia’s livelihood remains largely uninterrupted. “Quarantine life is my regular life,” she chuckled as a full-time artist living in solitude on acres of nature.

New Jersey offers the sprawling space she craved after years of sharing an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Now, stretched across blank white walls, some standing up to seven feet tall, her paintings are able to breathe. So is she with an upstairs bedroom and kitchen separated from her studio by a staircase she chose to paint bright red, a coerced distinction between waking life and her work.

At 26, Sofia is the artist she sought to become from a young age. Her paintings have been included in over twenty exhibits nationwide and sold to art collectors and patrons across the world. Within the last year, she wrote and illustrated her first novel, Sawdust, and found success in fashion design where she debuted wearable sculpture dresses for the 2019 Scene to Be Seen runway show in Naples, Florida. “I’m addicted,” she said of her relentless desire to create.

Pinning her garments for the Scene to be Seen runway show

A usual day for Sofia begins by journaling beside a cup of coffee. “I wake up around 6am because there’s something about morning silence that energizes me,” she said. “I’m less motivated at night.” She spends the day chasing flow state, which she describes as a sustained period of pure creativity.

Her art studio is clean and organized, the result of being a “neat painter with a tendency towards perfectionism”, she said. “The canvas is where I release my chaos and disorder.” After soaking each paint brush and tidying up at the end of the day, she studies her work while having dinner, contemplating her next stroke.

When Sofia was eighteen months old, her twenty five year old sister passed in a jet skiing accident that left their mother consumed with grief. Her grandmother stepped in and encouraged her to dance, sing, play piano, ride horses, and share stories. “I was a little girl full of activities,” she recalled. “I could sit and draw for hours. It was my way of healing.”

Born and raised in Newport Beach, California to a Jordanian father and a Spanish-American mother, she recounts the culture shock of moving to Bahrain from a pristine, sheltered life in America. Her discomfort stretched until she returned to the States a year later as a young teenager, attending an all-girls schools in Sedona, Arizona. At first, poetry grasped her, but after experimenting with different mediums of self-expression, painting advanced to the forefront. She moved back to Southern California and enrolled in a boarding school forty minutes south of Santa Barbara. There, she nurtured painting.

Sofia’s art is characterized by a liberal use of color, notably hues of blue and red, her favorite color. “It’s essential in every painting to have red,” she said. “Even if it’s the smallest dot.” This is evident on her website, www.sofiazubi.com, where an otherwise plain and colorless design is punctuated by two tiny red social media buttons.

Littered symbolism and carefully placed detail make Sofia’s paintings and illustrations a bit like a maze. White space is rare; like a thousand-piece puzzle, her artistry is busy if looked at inch by inch, but as a whole, feels complete.

Straight lines are hard to come by. Objects like knives and houses take on the curvy, playful shapes made famous by Matisse and Picasso, two of her greatest inspirations. Like both, Sofia’s paintings feature mostly women and still-life. In a frequent scene, a young woman co-exists with a dog–an ode to her truest companion, Obi. In It’s War, a large-scale acrylic painting, she smokes a cigarette with vengeance next to her apartment window while he lays on the couch. “Women, animals, and nature are the most painted subjects in art,” she told me. “Why? Perhaps because they’re the most beautiful things in life.”

In her own work, these subjects are often looking elsewhere or closing their eyes in what may be a sober moment at the end of a long and arduous journey. Their unconcern with the viewer gives us a sense that we are peering into a window uninvited, but not unwelcome.

Sofia studied art history and painting at Pratt Institute in New York City, the place she credits with helping her discover her true artistic style. Inspired by classmates and professors, she read biographies of Philip Guston, Patti Smith, and Sally Mann. She went to galleries and watched artist interviews and films. “I learned that art isn’t a profession, it’s a lifestyle,” she said. “You can’t tap into it like a 9-5. It becomes ingrained in you.”

After graduating from Pratt, she remained a student of the city, thriving off its pulsating energy and balancing two full-time jobs as a private children’s art teacher and gallery assistant. She penned a collection of drawings called “The Chaos Series” based off of her daily commutes on the subway.

She describes her work as a “visual diary” documenting childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Therein dwell the themes of any diary: love, gratitude, and hope along with fear, sorrow, and ache. “There have been times art destroyed me,” Sofia lamented, acknowledging it as both a tool and a weapon. A bout of artist’s block can fuel episodes of self-disdain, an example of how her emotions predicate on her work and not the other way around. Art is often holding the reigns.

Consequentially, it is the relinquishment of control that defines Sofia’s artistic process. She paints only from raw memory and imagination, adamant to not use external references that could hinder her intuition.

In 2015, while on a trip in Palestine with her father, she chose not to take a single photo. Later seen in one painting from her visit, a camel with two humps rests above the city landscape. When it was purchased by an art collector in Jordan, he mentioned that the breed of camels in Jerusalem have one hump, not two. “We were both amused at my error, which made us like the painting even more,” Sofia said. Shedding humor on herself, she titled the piece “The Only Bactrian Camel in Jerusalem”; native to Central Asia, Bactrian camels flaunt two humps.

The Only Bactrian Camel in Jerusalum, 2016
36 x 48 inches, acrylic

“Women, animals, and nature are the most celebrated subjects in art. Why? Perhaps because they’re the most beautiful things in life.”

In the early twentieth century, painting from instinct marked the beginning movements from realism to surrealism. While the art establishment laughed at surrealist artists, one prominent collector embraced their peculiarities, curating what would become one of the most influential collections of European and American art. Peggy Guggenheim is one of Sofia’s greatest idols. “I was blown away,” she said after visiting the collection at Palazzo Venier Dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice while studying abroad in Italy. “She believed in these artists during a time no one did.”

Contrary to what was then popular belief, “it is possible to paint an object, say a vase, based off of what it feels like rather than how it looks,” said Sofia, who paints under the influence of surrealism and abstract expressionism, but leans towards visuals a person can identify and latch onto.

She looks up to Marina Abromovic, Remedios Varo, Salvador Dali, Louise Bourgeois, and David Hockney, to name a few, but doesn’t think artists need to have an external muse or hero. “Inspiration should come from within,” she said with the gravitas of a purist, sometimes forgoing a trip to the museum in case it clouds her judgement. “How can I make something legendary or inventive if I’m too surrounded by other art?”

Illustrations from Sawdust

A central theme in her work is The Princess entity, a sure representation of herself extended to the universal woman seeking fulfillment, purpose, and self-love. In her children’s novel, Sawdust, The Princess escapes her castle and joins a circus; instead of falling in love, she finds a passion, reminiscent of Sofia’s own experiences as an only child fleeing to New York City in pursuit of art.

In other paintings, The Princess holds onto a single rose while riding a horse through the desert or clutches onto a bouquet of flowers while surrounded by her favorite things–a guitar, a jar of paintbrushes. “I portray the parts of my life I want to make more sense of,” Sofia said, recognizing that she conceived the drawings in her “Love Series” during a tumultuous time she fell in love, fell out of love, and struggled with deceit and confusion.

When she looked onto them after the fact, as they hung from gallery walls in Williamsburg, Virginia, she saw the series provided a linear answer to the paralyzing questions she had while bearing a heavy heart, though she didn’t know it at the time. “The Princess had to escape in order to love herself,” she gleamed. “And that’s exactly what I ended up doing.”