Cosondra Sjostrom: Process for Abstract Portraiture

Cosondra Sjostrom is a contemporary abstract painter who created Abstract Portraiture, a practice that transforms psychological presence into non-representational form through color, texture, and layered abstraction.

Sjostrom’s process is an intimate collaboration between artist and individual, transforming lived experience into enduring chromatic form. Each work originates in direct conversation with a collector or muse, where memory, emotional history, and psychological presence are explored as the foundation for the painting. From this exchange emerges a visual language of color, structure, and spatial tension unique to each individual.

The studio process begins with deep listening. Sjostrom observes tone, cadence, and emotional inflection within dialogue, translating these into evolving studies of color relationships and compositional structure. These studies function as emotional maps, establishing the chromatic logic that will guide the painting.

Painting develops through successive layers of construction and excavation. Dense impasto establishes an initial physical field, followed by layers of color that build psychological depth and resonance. The recurring rectangular motif functions as both structural anchor and conceptual threshold, containing the work while allowing internal expansion.

Through additive and subtractive processes, building, scraping, and reworking, earlier layers are partially revealed and transformed. This continual resurfacing creates a visual record of accumulation and revision, where memory and emotion remain active within the material structure of the painting.

Each work is completed as a singular Abstract Portrait: a record of psychological presence translated into material form. These paintings function as enduring studies of individual human experience, where personal narrative becomes a structured field of color, texture, and spatial energy.