Sophie Soto-Phipps

In Her Own Words:

"I'm Sophie, I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. My mom is actually from Spain; she was born in Spain and she grew up in Honduras. My dad's from Massachusetts, so I don't have the Tennessee accent. I didn't have that, you know, that Southern thing growing up in my house.

I think that I feel happy a lot of the time, when I do have time to do art; and it feels like I'm doing something for myself. You know, when you work in the service industry, you do so much for other people. It's funny that I spend my entire day talking to people and, and so this, I feel coming back to art at the end of the day, it's definitely something, that lets me reset and lets me, look introspectively painting, drawing, pen and ink, all of that kind of thing, is just something that I do. It's almost like meditation. It really helps me de-clutter my mind and just kind of decompress at the end of the day."

Sophie's Rules

I have a rule with my art that I don't do art just to force myself to do it. I always have to be in the mood, to go down and create something or else it never comes out right. It could be nine o'clock at night and I'll just be like, "Hey, you know what, I want to do this" and I'll go downstairs; and next thing you know, it's 2:00 AM and I'm like, "oh shit, I have to wake up tomorrow at five to get ready for work at six".


"I'm almost like a child in the way I do my art. "

There's not any sort of, end game not looking for some sort of goal. I have no idea when I start an artwork, how it's going to end. It's literally me just. Starting something and being like, do I like this? Do I not like this? And if I don't like it, I'll start to tweak it some way. And if I do like it, then I just trust myself and say like, what, you know, you take a step back kind of visualize, like, how do we, I don't like balance. So to say, like everything to be a little imbalanced. So it's almost like, how do we set this off kilter? I think that I'm just trying to. Get my energy out into a different medium.

The Impact of The Pandemic

I would definitely say that I started to take my art more seriously at the start of the pandemic. We couldn't go out, the coffee shop was closed, there wasn't a lot that I could do, just socially or financially. I decided that now it would be a good time to just kind of settle in and see how this feels and start to dedicate more time and experiment with my skill sets and all of that. I think that my art really helped me in the first couple months of the pandemic [Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020] , for sure.

I think that I came to the realization that, you know, I have my style and someone in the world will probably like it or identify with it and why shouldn't I try and put myself out there and see what happens?