Sophia’s paintings express the personalities of places and the people who occupy those places because of their desire for meaningful relationships. In terms of style, Sophia thinks of her paintings as layering the figurative narrative of American Folk Art on top of the textural assemblages of Abstract Expressionism. The plants and landforms are characters of equal importance to the persons among them. The paintings embrace our relationship to nature, separate from our twenty-first century technological existence but not as some sort of escapist delusion or romantic fantasy.