Portrait Series

Cosondra Sjostrom is an Existential Abstract painter who integrates the fragile boundary between corporeal vessel and unseen psyche, revealing the emotional undercurrents and inner landscapes that shape human experience, layer by layer.

After two decades of refinement, Cosondra unveiled her core motif in 2020: the monolithic rectangular silhouette, a distilled trace of the human form. It is a form that must exist, yet one from which the work inevitably transcends. From this grounded center, each painting radiates outward in luminous, unrestrained waves of color and emotion, desire, memory, trauma, healing, and the uncontainable energy of life itself.

This is where her iconic scraping performs its alchemy. Dense impasto is built, excavated, and rebuilt in luminous strata of gesture and hue. Earlier marks ghost through translucent veils, buried colors resurface in healing waves, each layer a palimpsest of emotional archaeology. Thick ridges pulse with hidden secrets while turbulent acrylic surges overflow the rectangle in sculptural, celebratory abandon.

The surrounding canvas remains deliberately restrained so that all luminosity, vibrational charge, and emotional force radiate from within. Meaning is born inside and joyously transcends every boundary, reversing mid-century color-field logic: emotion is no longer an enveloping haze but an incandescent living core that glows and expands.

The rectangle is a quantum threshold: what appears bounded is, at the level of feeling, entangled, probabilistic, passionately alive; every mark in superposition with every other, every resurfaced hue deeply intertwined with past, present, and ever-evolving future. Vibrancy pulses from a bioluminescent center, echoing Sjostrom’s ethos of a forever-evolving inner narrative.