Inside the Mind of an Artist

Joan Sonnenberg doesn’t look as if she paints large, colorful, bold paintings. She’s a petite, soft-spoken woman of 76 with short red hair, and she jokes that she’s often mistaken for the artist’s mother rather than the artist herself. She paints daily. When she greets you at the door, you can’t help but notice the blue paint on her hands. Inside her Naples home, canvases line the walls three and four deep; there are 30 in the bedroom alone. Sonnenberg works in a variety of styles, from abstract to realistic, from organic to hard-edge, using acrylic, pastels and charcoal. She’s won a variety of awards, and her art is in the corporate collections of Xerox Corp., Toshiba Corp., Arthur Andersen, USX Corp. and The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., just to name a few. In 2004, Sonnenberg had a one-woman retrospective, Images Transcending the Mediums, at the Coral Springs Museum of Art.

Art: The Most Important Thing
Art is my life. I don’t miss a day if I can help it. It’s the most important thing I can do in life. I raised four children and was a good wife and mother, but during that period of time, I was also producing artwork. I never stopped.

When we were first married, I painted in the kitchen, which was nine-by-12 feet. I did huge six-by-nine-foot panels across, diagonally. To open the refrigerator door was sometimes a challenge because I’d paint a piece for a couple months at a time. And I’d have to move the piece to get into the refrigerator!

I want to just do this and nothing else. I have many friends who say, "Why don’t you participate in all these clubs?" I’m not a clubber. But I do belong to art organizations, because that is a way of extending my work.

My mother introduced me to painting and drawing when I was five years old. She was a sculptor, very artistic. I was an only child who was always looking for a playmate. And my best friend was at the end of my right arm.

I learned my ABCs of painting at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. They are: composition, drawing from life and drawing from your imagination. Every Saturday, from grade school all the way through high school, I took art classes. I was a scholarship winner, and I had the same instructors as the college students. It was a wonderful experience because it just opened doors for me.

And then I went to the Carnegie Mellon University for a degree in fine arts.

It’s Joan, not John
At exhibitions I listen to the comments. They’re all over the board. One of the comments I hear is, "It must have been done by a man, it’s so strong, it’s so big."

I do like to work large. I tighten up when I work small. I like to be explosive. I like large ideas and concepts, and I want the work to jump out. I want people to be brought in.

I’ve always been drawn to large, abstract paintings. I’d walk into the museum, and that was what would grab me. It was infectious—you couldn’t help it. You’re drawn to it, and I like that feeling.
I’m a bold person in my art, but not in my personality. That’s the wonderful thing about art: You can be what you want. You can be anything.

Twenty years ago, I heard a docent talk about my 18-foot painting, American Dream, and said, "This is the work of John Sonnenberg. He’s a very architectural painter." And she went on and on about John Sonnenberg. I wanted to come out from behind the painting and say, "I am Joan Sonnenberg; I’m a female!"

Donald Miller, a very fine art critic at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette then, knew my work extremely well. He wrote very favorably about me. But he said, "Joan, if you had been a man, you would be much further along than you are. It’s only because you’re female."

We Could Have Peace …
Sometimes I like to challenge people, be political and make strong statements. I won Best of Show in the Founders Exhibit at The von Liebig, and also at the Carnegie Museum of Art for Bridge Over Troubled Waters. It explores the fact that I’m troubled by the conditions today. I wish that things were better than they are.

In the painting, you have this rhythm. This black line is making a connection, unification. It’s bringing the world together symbolically.

It’s a statement for peace—the fact that we could have peace if we could bring the world together, unite the world and forget the bloody wars. I’ve lived through all these wars and have seen how they affect our country.

Trash to Treasure
This piece is called Pre-emptive Strike. Most people today don’t feel that the war was a good idea. I used different pastels on black Arches paper. It just gives it a more somber look, and the black comes through.

We had a son, and he liked to bring us to the shipyards. That’s what these are, photos of many different parts of the ships, compounded into nine images on the canvas. They were overlaps on the camera film, nine images on the same frame.

I kept exposing the same frame of film with different images. My son was saying to me, "Mom, why don’t you take photos of the ships?" I said, "I like these relics. I like the discarded parts."
They were shipyard parts of old propellers, blades and parts of ships, like Neptune might have found at the bottom of the ocean. There is actually an accidental burn on the piece. And I enjoyed that. I wanted something to look like it’s on fire.

The Big Squeeze
I created a painting of a valve I found behind a Publix supermarket. I loved all those screws and the dynamics of the chain. It looked massive. It was so interesting to me—all the components, all the rust. I love rust. And I love things that drip with rust, and have craters on them—things that are decaying. There’s so much color in decay.

I think about gasoline and the war—these undertones of political feelings I have. Think about how our gasoline is a big squeeze.

So many people must have passed by this valve and didn’t think it was important. But as an artist, you see things that may not appeal to many people, but they’re important to you because of the colors, the strength.

Finding this valve was a happy accident. I had an instructor one time who said, "Even though you plan things, things are going to come up to you sometimes. We call them happy accidents. And you’re there at the right time."

Portraits of My Father
These are pastels I recently did of my father. He died in ’97, and he was 95. He would sit outside in the sun in the 90-degree heat with blankets on him, and he would say, "Why did we wait so long to come to Florida? Why didn’t I move here sooner? This is wonderful!" I took 20 or 25 photos of him, and he’d say, "Why are you taking so many photos?" I said, "I’m going to make many paintings of you some day."

I worked from the photos, because it’s very hard to have an older person sit still for a painting. The heads I painted are bigger than life, but that was my dad to me—he was bigger than life.
I had these in the Pastel International Society. However, I overheard one of the jurors say, "Too much bravado." His thinking was that pastel should soft-pedal, not be strong. To me, that’s putting a damper on art, when you say that something has to fit within certain confines.

My work is painted strongly, but there’s nothing in it that’s falsely done. And I think bravado means too much false strength. And he wanted more subtle forms: barns and palm trees, flowers, all of that. In Florida, there are so many palm trees and so many beach scenes; I see them all the time. But I want to paint subjects that are more provocative.

I’m painting a little bit stronger, full of bravado. But I take bravado on my terms, not his. I want to put a positive spin on those words, turn bravado into something good, because I want to be out there, and I want a challenge. I want to do that thing that someone else hasn’t done. I want to be innovative. And I don’t see anything wrong with it.

The Importance of Making Mistakes
Sometimes you think a work is going to go one way, and then it goes another way—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. Then you scrap it and say, "I guess it didn’t work out. But I have something else I’m going to work on that may work out."

I’ve made so many mistakes. I could write a book about mistakes. If you find you’re going in a wrong direction, you can change that direction. You can’t always be so self-contained and so satisfied with yourself. You always want to be out there, doing the very best job you can do. And it isn’t always going to work out; it’s not going to be perfect all the time. You make a lot of mistakes, and you learn from them.