Sophie Wake.
Sophie wake in her studio
Sophie Wake Bio
Sophie Wake is an award-winning, contemporary British artist, who lives and works in Brighton. Her aesthetic harnesses the power of primordial storytelling and raw emotion through honest forms. Her paintings of animals and candid portrayals of the female form are characterised by a tender and intimate aesthetic. Powerfully expressive, her paintings strip away layers of self-awareness, reaching inward to capture the beauty of intuitive emotion. Her works are full of life, each one a snapshot of unrefined, raw human emotion.
Sophie’s story:
Sophie graduated from Brighton University, with a BA Hons in Graphic Design & Illustration and worked for more than twenty years as a successful freelance illustrator. Today, her fineart practice responds to the rhythms of meditation that fill her life as a Buddhist practitioner. Her paintings blend delight, humour and profound reflection, celebrating the pure, unfiltered joy of experiencing life in the present.
Sophie’s practice:
Sophie works from her studio in Brighton, where she channels her imagination through an intimately physical creative process. Guided by direct somatic experience, her works are instinctive, each one an automatic process of deep self enquiry. Every piece is the product of a connection between the painter and her canvas, each brushstroke bearing the trace of human creativity and feeling. Working with oil on canvas or gouache on paper, Sophie’s paintings are suffused with a liminal quality, a sense of in-betweenness that reflects on the intangible and revels in small mysteries.
Her recent series ‘Moon Dancer’ responds to Sophie’s spiritual practice. The paintings depict women as divine icons, who dance uninhibited under the light of the moon, rejoicing in their liberation, their inner beauty, and their shining wisdom. More recently, she has been working on a series of vase paintings inspired by the Bloomsbury collection of arts and crafts at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex. The influence of African rock art, Egyptian clay models, and Ancient Greek pottery can be felt throughout the collection, which celebrates the power of storytelling and primordial channeling in her simple and authentic forms.
Awards:
Sophie’s inimitable and instantly recognisable style has earned her numerous prestigious art awards and accolades in recent years. In 2017, she was shortlisted for 3 Artists Open House Awards, winning Best Newcomer. In 2018, Sophie’s painting HERD was selected for the Royal Academy’s 250th Summer Exhibition, where it appeared in Grayson Perry’s hand-curated Yellow Room. In 2019 she won Best Artists Open House, Brighton, and was commended for the Sol Design ‘Creative Celebration’ award, and in 2020 she was chosen as the AOH brochure cover artist with her painting HOPE.
