What Is Psychological Abstraction?

Psychological Abstraction is the core methodology of Cosondra Sjostrom’s practice. It translates the psychological presence of a specific individual into layered color, surface, and form. Unlike approaches that seek universal emotional atmosphere or purely gestural expression, Psychological Abstraction is anchored in specificity: each work originates from direct conversation, personal narrative, or lived experience with an individual.

The process draws from phenomenological and existential traditions in psychology and philosophy, particularly the work of thinkers such as Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized lived experience, perception, and the embodied nature of consciousness. Within this framework, emotional states are not symbolic ideas but lived realities that can be translated into material form.

On the canvas, dense impasto builds psychological weight while excavation and scraping reveal underlying strata of experience. Luminous veils introduce ambiguity, reflection, and partial emergence. Through these processes, Psychological Abstraction constructs an embodied chromatic field that holds the complexity of an individual psyche while extending into broader human conditions of identity, memory, and perception.

The result is not symbolic representation, but an abstract psychological portrait,one that preserves the specificity of an individual while opening toward universal human experience.