By Sarah Mills

My watercolors are distillations of Italian dreams, Moroccan dreams, Parisian dreams, but most of all, Venetian Dreams. I paint the landscape of feelings and memories lost and found during travels to faraway lands.

The essence of a place is the emotion it evokes. The essence of my watercolors, whether painted while I travel or from my studio, is to celebrate those emotions and memories that seem transient, yet, when captured, are the very treasures that awaken us to new and infinite possibilities.

My background in Architecture continually inspires me to travel to countries whose sense of place intrigues me, and to make my art while doing so. I’ve spent most of my time abroad traveling throughout Italy, with Venice being my most beloved and inspiring muse. In addition to pursuing my art, I’ve also enjoyed teaching classes in Architecture and Historic Preservation, as well as watercolor workshops with a focus on painting Italian sites and monuments. Currently, my art is in private collections throughout the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Italy.

www.sophiakhanstudio.com

Briefly tell us about your creative journey. How did you get to where you are today?

I think anyone who is creatively inclined opens themselves to living a life in which they take note of and invite synchronistic experiences, encounters, and awakenings. For me, it was a beautiful series of these that led to the path I am so joyously on today; a path that while I may not have planned out for myself, is so utterly steeped in the truth of who I am.

These moments are all both gifts in and of themselves and have come together to tell the story of my creative life. They include drawing Paris’s Triumphal Arch in my childhood, a small set of watercolors I instinctively decided to take with me to Italy while studying Architecture, a gondola ride that awaits, a book of poems from the Sassi of Matera in Italy, a melody sung by an Italian archaeologist, a book published in 1892 by John Seymour Wood, titled “A Daughter of Venice,” and many other beautiful “yeses” along the way.

Travel and architecture seem to have a large effect on your work. Can you tell us more about this?

When I was in elementary school, I was very drawn to the romance, history, magic, and the indescribable air, or je ne sais quoi, around Paris. I would often peruse the Architecture section of the Encyclopedia Britannica that we had in our home. I remember being very drawn to the black and white images of the Paris Opera House. Perhaps these images opened up for me this notion of life as being something embellished with fantasy, adventure, and wonder. I felt a strong draw to all the wonderful things that these images were evoking in me.

I started traveling internationally during my undergraduate studies in Architecture. As soon as we landed in Italy - with the first city we stayed in being Venice - it awakened something in me that I didn’t even know I had within. Travel soon became a path of self-discovery that I wanted to continue. It’s become a kind of life long quest of going out of my way and finding myself in unfamiliar places and seeing what I can learn about myself, and also what I can learn from other cultures and other ways of creating place and a sense of home.

Finding a sense of belonging in a place that is unfamiliar is quite extraordinary because it’s counterintuitive. We typically think of home as the surroundings we are used to at the time we are growing up, and where we were nurtured and taught how to be in the world. But, I think the biggest life lessons for me came through my travels, and I learned that a sense of belonging often comes from places that mirror something back to us about who we are in a way that we hadn’t seen before.

When did you begin working with watercolor and why?

When I was studying abroad in Italy, our professors encouraged us to put away our cameras and to instead draw what we were seeing as a means of analysis. The last city we visited during this trip was Matera, with its series of cave dwellings called the Sassi. It just so happened that I had brought along with me a small set of watercolors, however, I had not touched them throughout the whole trip. I think I had forgotten that I even had them. But when I was in Matera, there was something I felt could not be fully captured with a pencil sketch; it was an intuitive and visceral reaction I had and I decided I wanted to paint the Sassi. The watercolors I painted there were very interpretive. I used colors that were not literally what I was seeing but perhaps what was being evoked in me, or how I was interpreting what I was seeing, and what I most wanted to remember when I left.

It’s interesting that I hadn’t quite returned to regularly painting watercolors after that, until several years later. However, now that I look back at the watercolors I painted in Matera, I feel that my aesthetic was beginning to develop itself from that moment on.

Your watercolors have a beautiful color palette! Can you share with us how you pick colors for your work? 

The colors that I choose to work with are very interpretive. In some watercolors, I want to capture the local climate. If it’s a warm climate I’ll use warm colors like reds and alizarin crimson, and if it’s a cool climate, I’ll use a lot of different blues. Another way that I look at color is that it may be representative of the location. If I am painting a monument and the city or town has a certain dominant color scheme, I might incorporate those colors into the monument. I also look at color in relation to feelings. If I’m feeling very nostalgic and remembering a place with a lot of affection, I might use a lot of pinks and reds. Once in a while, I will simply use the colors that one actually sees in the place that I am painting.

Much of this decision making actually happens intuitively, as most of the places I paint are those that I have visited, and so there is a level of awareness inherent in the moment I approach the blank paper that has an element of spontaneity.

What do you hope viewers take away from your work?

It is interesting to ponder this question because the more I practice my art, the more I paint, and continue on this enriching journey of being an artist, the more aware I become of what the work has to tell me and also what I hope it offers viewers.

I am often told that there is a certain serenity and a dream-like quality to my watercolors. I am very happy and grateful to hear that. This is something I may not have consciously intended, but I think it comes through in the work because those are qualities I myself associate with the places I paint.

I paint sites throughout different countries and each of these places evokes something different for each individual. Places are monuments not in and of themselves, but of the human spirit. And we are drawn to those that celebrate most what is unique within each of us. I hope my viewer is able to, in some way, see and feel seen and celebrated within the impressions of the places I paint.

My art is also about remembering. Remembering a place and all the associated inspirations that it evokes within us when we traveled there.

Perhaps my art, my way of remembering, can also instill the importance of safeguarding many of the places I feel fortunate to have traveled to and paint.