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Sonja Hargreaves
AUSTRALIA
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"I believe my art will bring healing and restoration to many as they look upon his face."
Sonja Hargreaves paints from the Gold Coast, Australia, and the ten works in this exhibition trace a life that has passed through faith, survival, and the strange territory of the spirit. Looking into the Face of Jesus and Russian Icon Style Jesus place the viewer directly before the figure at the center of her belief. Woman of Courage and Humanly Trafficked speak for what she has lived through. Regal Lion, Red Dragon, The Beast, and The New World Order draw their symbols from scripture and the supernatural realm she describes as more real than the visible world. Mystic and Magic Mirror turn inward, toward a self that is spirit before it is body. Across oil on canvas and graphite on paper, these are portraits in the widest sense, of people, of creatures, and of a conviction that a painting can open a door.
Looking into the Face of Jesus | Oil
$1,500
50 x 60 cm
I wanted to paint a portrait of Jesus Christ. I have had a relationship with Him since I was 19 years old, after a near-death experience in which I went to heaven, and my life has never been the same. He is my reason for living, and my gifts, talents, and abilities are given to me by Him. I believe my art will bring healing and restoration to many as they look upon the face of Jesus. It is a portal into the supernatural realm.
Faith is the ground on which everything else in this exhibition stands. At nineteen, Hargreaves went through a near-death experience that she describes as a journey to heaven, and she has lived in a relationship with Jesus Christ ever since. She considers her gifts and abilities to be given rather than earned, and she makes her two portraits of Christ with a specific hope: that those who look upon the painted face will find healing and restoration. Looking into the Face of Jesus approaches him as a living presence, while Russian Icon Style Jesus borrows the frontal stillness of Orthodox iconography and reimagines it in her own hand. Neither painting is meant to be decorative. Each is offered as a portal, a surface through which something beyond the material world is invited to pass toward the viewer.
Russian Icon Style Jesus | Oil
$1,500
70 x 80 cm
I wanted to paint an icon-style painting representing Jesus Christ as an imagined image. I believe this painting will bring healing and restoration as people gaze upon His face and realize the importance of all that He is.
"On the canvas, I decide what exists. I can simply create."
Thirteen was the age at which she first understood that art could matter to someone other than herself. Invited to attend an art institute, she met a teacher who recognized what her drawings held before she could name it. He encouraged her, told her she had potential, and purchased several of her early works, which gave her the first proof that an image made from her inner life could carry meaning for another person. Pursuing that path proved impossible at the time. Without support or money, she set the ambition aside and carried it quietly for decades. Her return to painting in adulthood is therefore not a hobby taken up late but the resumption of an interrupted calling, and the directness of the work on view reflects a maker who has waited a long time to say what she sees.
Mystic | Oil
$1,500
50 x 60 cm
I painted this lady to represent the mystical realm of the spirit. She represents my life and is an expression of my mystical journey into the supernatural realm, where things are not as they seem. We are more than just a body; we are pure spirit.
Survival runs underneath the exhibition as its second foundation. Hargreaves has lived with post-traumatic stress disorder since the age of twelve, following childhood abuse, and in adulthood she endured further harm, including domestic violence and, at nineteen, human trafficking. She speaks about these experiences openly, and two paintings confront them head on. Woman of Courage is a portrait of a survivor, made to give form to the darkest period of her life. Humanly Trafficked was painted to show how trafficking operates across every border and touches people regardless of age, culture, or gender. She intends the painting to be confronting. Yet she refuses to let her art stand only as a record of suffering; it is equally an act of imagination and a claim on the parts of herself that none of those experiences could take.
I painted this piece to express some of the darkest days of my life. Having experienced childhood abuse and domestic violence, I wanted to paint a portrait of a woman survivor.
Woman of Courage | Oil
$1,500
50 x 60 cm
"My art teacher saw something in my work that I was only beginning to see in myself. He encouraged me, believed in my potential, and even bought some of my drawings. It was one of the first times I felt that something I had created from within myself could hold meaning for someone else."
"Surrealism allows me to communicate experiences that do not always translate neatly into reality. A body does not have to look like a body. Something can be beautiful and unsettling at the same time. Forms can stretch, soften, fragment, disappear or become something entirely different. Reality can bend around emotion rather than emotion having to fit within reality. I am currently exploring this through what I call my bubble people, soft, exaggerated and surreal human forms that do not conform to what a person or body is supposed to look like. They allow me to explore vulnerability, identity, memory and emotion without needing to explain them literally. Their distortion is not necessarily imperfection; to me, it represents freedom from having to exist in a prescribed form. My work inevitably carries pieces of what I have lived through, but I do not want it to exist only as a representation of pain. It is also an expression of imagination, survival, freedom and the parts of myself that those experiences could not take away."
Humanly Trafficked | Oil
$1,500
50 x 60 cm
I painted this piece as a survivor of human trafficking at 19 years old. It shows how human trafficking operates all over the world and knows no boundaries. I hope my art is confronting and shows others that we need to stop these things from happening, as they affect people of every age, cultural background, and gender. I hope to write books someday and fund safe places for survivors of human trafficking, abuse, and domestic violence.
Freedom is the word she returns to when describing why she paints. After years in which control, fear, and the demands of survival filled so much space, the studio offers territory where no rule applies. There is no correct answer on the canvas and no standard her work must satisfy, and she alone decides what will exist there. That freedom shapes the character of the exhibition. Faces are allowed to carry more than a likeness, creatures stand for forces, and the boundary between the seen and the unseen is treated as negotiable. Hargreaves describes the feeling of making as expressive, happy, and unlimited, three words that sit at some distance from the subject matter of several works, and that distance is the point. The act of painting is itself the relief, whatever the painting depicts.
Red Dragon | Oil
$1,500
60 x 70 cm
I painted this because I love drawing and painting dragons. I love the mystical realm and believe that dragons did exist and are still real in the spirit realm.
Surrealism gives her the vocabulary for experiences that will not translate neatly into ordinary reality. In her understanding of the style, a body need not resemble a body, an image can be lovely and disturbing in the same instant, and form may stretch, soften, fragment, or vanish so that the picture bends around feeling instead of forcing feeling to fit the picture. Mystic belongs to this way of seeing. The woman in the painting stands for the mystical realm of the spirit and for the artist's own journey into a world where things are not as they appear and where a person is pure spirit rather than merely a body. Her current exploration extends the idea through what she calls bubble people, soft and exaggerated human forms that are free to exist without conforming to any prescribed shape.
This is my very first painting. I was experimenting with the human face and discovered that the portrait reminded me of the magic mirror from fairy tales. I believe paintings can become a portal to the supernatural realm.
Magic Mirror | Oil
$1,500
60 x 70 cm
Magic Mirror holds a special position as the very first painting she completed. Experimenting with the human face, she found that the finished portrait reminded her of the enchanted mirror of fairy tales, and that discovery led her to a belief that runs through the whole body of work: a painting can function as a passage into the supernatural. Regal Lion comes from the same early period. It presents an imagined lion from the spirit world as an emblem of Christ, the lion of Judah's tribe. Seen together, these two early canvases show how quickly her central concerns took shape. Even before technique had settled, the subjects were already there: the face as threshold, the animal as emblem, and the conviction that the painted surface is thinner than it looks.
"Art gives those parts of me somewhere to exist."
Dragons and beasts occupy the apocalyptic wing of the exhibition. Red Dragon grows from a lifelong love of drawing dragons and from her belief that they existed once and remain real in the spirit realm. The Beast, a small pencil drawing, gives the creature from the Book of Revelation the appearance of the world system it stands for. The New World Order, the largest work on view at one hundred centimeters square and also in pencil, sets Christ as its central figure with that beast system closing around him. For Hargreaves these are not fantasies but readings of prophecy, pictures of events she believes must unfold before the return of Christ. The restraint of graphite suits them. Without color, the drawings read as diagrams of the unseen, patient and deliberate, and the contrast with the oil paintings sharpens both.
Regal Lion | Oil
$1,500
60 x 70 cm
This is my portrait of an imagined lion in the spiritual realm. It is a metaphor for Jesus Christ as the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and one of my first paintings.
Oil on canvas carries most of the exhibition, in sizes from fifty by sixty centimeters up to seventy by eighty, with the two pencil works bracketing the range at A4 and one meter square. The jury that selected Hargreaves for this exhibition described her oil portraits as evocative, singled out the memorable combination of expression and subject in each one, and praised her choice of palette, and those three qualities explain why the paintings hold attention. Expression is where her portraits do their work: the face of Christ, the survivor, the mystic, and the lion are each carried by what the features convey rather than by setting or detail. Color is chosen for feeling. The pencil drawings strip even that away and rely on line alone, which makes The Beast and The New World Order read as the most austere statements in the room and the oils as the most immediate.
My dragon is an impression of the supernatural realm and the world system. He represents the dragon from the Book of Revelation.
The Beast | Pencil
$150
21 x 29.7 cm
Beyond the gallery, Hargreaves hopes one day to write books and to help finance safe places for survivors of trafficking, abuse, and domestic violence, so that her art becomes part of a larger work of restoration. This exhibition is a step in that direction and a return as well. The girl who had to put her drawings away is, in her own words, finally allowed to keep drawing, and every work here carries that permission. A visitor is invited to stand before the face of Jesus, to meet the survivor in Woman of Courage, to follow the lion and the dragon into the realm she believes lies just behind the visible, and then to leave with a question rather than an answer. If these paintings are portals, as she insists they are, then what waits on the other side is for each viewer to decide.
The New World Order | Pencil
$1,500
100 x 100 cm
I made this piece as a metaphor for the coming New World Order system, with Christ as the central figure and the beast system surrounding Him. All these things must happen before the return of Jesus Christ to the earth.
"This is my portrait of an imagined lion in the spiritual realm, a metaphor for Jesus Christ as the Lion of the tribe of Judah."
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