Having lived her youth on the farm located in Minas Gerais, Brazil, visual artist Sofia Lotti, brings aspects the nature in most of her works. Now, settled in São Paulo, she still searches for glimpses of nature in this city of 12 million people.
Working mostly with soft-pastel, watercolor and embroidery, her research in Mooste is based on the decomposition of the leaves and its colours (project that began with eucalyptus leaves in Poços de Caldas, her hometown), and the estonian landscapes.
In her free time, she enjoys researching birds.
http://sofialotti.wixsite.com/portfolio
The project that I want to develop started here in Brazil, in the farm and house that I lived for many years and now just visit once a month to see my family. Everytime I go, I walk around the eucaliptus plantation and collect it leaves in decomposition (now I have 150 archived photos), which are very colorful in so many shades that it inspired me to start one series of soft pastel work. This series brings out these colors, putting my impressions from what I see, onto the paper through soft pastel.
For that, I have to take pictures of the leaves right after being collected, because one day before, their colors will be darker, approaching that brown tone of decomposition that we are all very acquainted. Because this fragile condition of time, and the timeless condition of the photo (that keeps the colors intact), I felt like doing this artwork with soft pastel, since its texture like velvet brought me the idea of decomposition dust. And, a very important detail, if you don’t put the fixative - which makes the painting delicate to touch (not putting) -, the color of soft pastel remains very vibrant and strong, which reminds the colorful leaf of eucaliptus in the moment that it is collected in the woods: also, fragile. I call this project "The Velvet Nature".
For MoKS Residency, my project will be the transference of this idea to somewhere else far from this little part of Brazil, so far from Estonia. I will search for decomposition in leaves, in nature (and maybe somewhere that I didn’t realize yet), and bring it to the paper, putting my impression of this colors in the paper sheet. I intend to go openminded to what can transform my ideas and maybe give a new path for my work. I know that in that region of the world, I’ll get in contact with new shapes, tones and plants, and this excites me. I will also get in contact with other ideas and ideals, and that makes me feel that I’m in the right way, because without exchange and break of my personal patterns, how would I evolve as an artist?
