Sophie Pearson is a Star
Her visceral work drawn from trauma turns pain into power. And a lot of people are watching.
{ By Allie Heimos }
Sophie Pearson is an oil painter, but when we sit down to chat she’s branching out with a very different medium. “I would say right now it’s 80% oil paint, 20% pumpkin carving,” the artist says as she describes her practice. It’s late September and Pearson is prepping pumpkins for the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at Roger Williams Park Zoo. She knows it’s a major divergence from her work in paint, but the meditative videos of Pearson carefully carving away the firm skin of a bright orange squash still perform well online–and that’s important because she has to feed the masses.
Pearson is a megastar artist (henceforth “megastartist”) on TikTok and Instagram, where she shares not only her artwork and process, but the kinds of personal hauntings most of us wish we could ghost. Scrolling through @creating.sophie, you and her thousands of followers will see images of her finished pieces and short videos of the artist at work, often laced with personal divulgences and references to trauma. It’s the pain that drives Sophie Pearson to paint.
“Everything I make is about my trauma,” says Pearson. Sophie identifies as a fat-positive fine artist, with fatness and body image making up one core of her practice. Her body is frequently the subject of her color-saturated paintings on canvas. Her body laid bare to us, she is literally taking up space. Her image is sometimes distorted, sometimes uncomfortable to witness: a strong tug of a cheek, a belt cinching tight at her waist, a pair of scissors ready to slice into her lower belly. An enduring ache is laid bare too.
Pearson’s figurative work contains a rawness, not just a knack for color and form. It’s her candidness that keeps her followers coming back for more. Surely she could paint pretty landscapes or lovely still lifes, but those subjects wouldn’t be compulsory, and that’s key here. “I paint what I feel like I have to paint,” says Pearson.
Pearson has long had a passion for making art–“Creating is something I’ve always loved to do”--and she refined that passion at Lesley University in Cambridge where she majored in fine art on a lark, unsure of where it would lead her. It was at Lesley that she first picked up a brush. She found the process simultaneously interesting and terrifying. It started with a self-portrait by Alice Neel. The artist sits perched on a chair, her 80-year old body undressed, relaxed, and honest. Neel’s piece was used as a prompt, and students were asked to create their own self portraits. That’s how Sophie Pearson found herself standing naked in front of the mirror, trying to figure out how to arrange her own body in the frame.
She experimented with different poses. How can I make this image more…interesting? She grabbed a belt and began playing with ways she could use it to manipulate her form. She cinched the belt tight around her waist, so tight that you know by looking at it what kind of mark it would leave on your own skin. Her belly is bifurcated, squeezed into two distinct sections straining above and below their taut divider. This is not Neel casually planted on her seat.
The response in class from her teacher and her peers was overwhelmingly positive. “It was validating,” she says as she recalls this early experience. “I was thrown into the deep end right away.” Sophie was taking a risk with this work, unveiling something so personal so early in her practice. But it paid off. She titled the piece Cinched, and it was the subject of her first viral video.
It was November, 2021, and it was just the start of a whole series of related works. Throughout college and afterward, she continued to make more work like Cinched. As she went further with the series, she only became more comfortable using her art to visit vulnerable spaces. The work is drawn from trauma, a feat in its own right, but many also found pure joy in seeing a body that looked more like their own. This is ultimately the true power of work like Cinched. In a media environment where “thinspo” videos regularly fetch hundreds or thousands of likes, Pearson is holding down her own little corner of an oppositional force: This in my body. This body has a right to be here, to be seen.
The likes and DMs flooded in. A thousand, then ten thousand. Twenty, then forty thousand. As of this fall, 42.5K on Instagram and 62.5K on TikTok. The massive following took the artist by surprise since she wouldn’t typically describe herself as the kind of person who is comfortable being the center of attention. The bravery required to step into the spotlight is worth something to her followers. Many see their own lives reflected—celebrated!--in these paintings. “When I started getting messages from so many people about how personally affected they are by my work,” Pearson says, “that was when I was like, ‘Whoa.’” Online, a door was opened. Deep conversations with strangers bubbled up from posts. Her bravery was paying off.
More recently, Pearson has been working on another series, this one peeking into perhaps an even more emotionally vulnerable place. Pearson’s Beneath the Memory explores a painful childhood and the fallout that continues into her present life. In May 2024 it will jump from the screen to the wall at ArtsWorcester for the artist’s first solo exhibition.
Working from old childhood photos for Beneath the Memory, Sophie keeps herself within view, but obscures adult figures. In The Birthdays Before, Sophie the child wears a paper crown and blows out a candle on a birthday cake. A pair of hands coming from just out of the frame sweep back her hair. But the hands are flattened and cobalt blue, haphazardly filled in with a childlike tenor to her brushstroke. The other figures are hidden too–they exist as vague shapes in cool blues and greens blending into the background. The effect is slightly disorienting. A sweet moment turned sour. On Instagram, the scene is accompanied by a quote from the novelist John Corey Whaley: “But in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you’re thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you feeling a little emptier afterwards.”
Pearson has been feeling drawn to themes in nostalgia recently. She tells me about how this series compels her to look at complicated relationships and whittle them down. The work–and that uneasy feeling–is simplified to “what lives in my mind, my memory,” as she says. Her father does not appear as he actually looked, but instead becomes just a color, just a shape. This is how he inhabits Pearson’s mind, further diluted through every iteration of memory.
We do this so frequently that we forget that we do it at all. We inadvertently connect memories, experiences, and people with colors or sounds. We flatten, we protect ourselves. We see our past selves through the lens of who we are now. Adult Sophie reaches out to her younger self to protect her from what’s hidden in the painted scene. “It’s a mashup of who I am now with who I was as a kid,” Pearson says. A birthday party or a day at the beach become vehicles for processing past traumas. Whose hands are those, gently brushing her hair away from the flame? Who is the red figure (I remember you in the ocean) leaning over a tiny Sophie wading in the shallow water? The specifics may not be for us to know. We all have things we’d rather forget.
The more guarded work doesn’t do as well online. Her followers are drawn to Pearson’s authenticity, almost as if they too understand that gut feeling Sophie has. I paint what I feel like I have to paint. The response has been staggering.
Yes, there are trolls. And when you’re swimming in these waters, inevitably there are people who send messages unloading their own personal traumas. It can be a lot to take in. Sophie Pearson is not your therapist. The relationship between @creating.sophie, Sophie herself, and her legions of followers can be complicated. But Pearson is proud of the impact her art has had on her followers. In the comments, you see a lot of “I relate so much to this” and “this is me.” Knowing that her art can provide comfort or motivation encourages her to keep things genuine, even if it is a little scary.
Pearson paints in her home studio in Worcester, dutifully filming and snapping photos to develop into new content. It’s a full house between Sophie and her husband, their cats Daphne and Milton, and Doc the German shepherd, but it seems to be a place of peace for the artist. Given the emotional heavy lifting going on in this work, oil paint feels like a fitting choice of medium. She loves working with oils–the slow-drying pigments allow for thoughtful pauses. “I stop and I look and I look,” says Pearson. The process is slow, but anyone who’s ever crossed the threshold of a therapist’s office will tell you, healing is slow too.
“Everything I make goes back to some kind of trauma, even the ‘happy’ things because they came out of that trauma too,” the artist says as we wrap up. Milton the new kitten is getting antsy and wants us to move on with the day. There are pumpkins to carve. There is more work to do, then share. More to uncover, more opportunities to process heartache into empowerment. It is a powerful journey. No wonder we love watching.