Gallery With A Cause • Located in the New Mexico Cancer Center • Benefitting the NMCC Foundation
Please call gallery director Regina Held to arrange a private gallery tour, make a purchase, or ask any questions.
Biography
Sondra Wampler was born in southern California. She attended Santa Monica College, completing the Commercial photography program in 1982. While pursuing a career in commercial photography her focus turned to fine art, being influenced by the modern painters as well as early Master of Photography. Sondra is best known for her botanic still life work. She was published in Graphis Flora as well as Graphis Photo Annual 2005 and her works can be found in private as well as corporate collections.
Artist Statement
The imagery I have been creating for the past several years is based on dreams. The mind is amazing the way it processes, resolves and sketches through dreams, often in amazing colors like old color film. My work is about being in harmony with nature and the natural world; always peaceful, inviting and intriguing. It is my bigger dream for the future to live in such a harmonious world. One can hope, and hope gets you through this journey of life.
In my work I express my love of art history and the figure by combining them with my own photographic imagery. The result is a mixed media process where I layer acrylic paint, digital collage, and image transfer. I find it very exciting to combine new techniques and materials of the digital age with tried-and-true traditional materials. Combining the two really reflects the subject matter of my work of past, present, and future. Each piece begins with painting color fields, textures or objects using acrylic paint and chalk pastel onto handmade Baltic birch panels. Next digital manipulation is used to montage my photographs in much the same way one would create a montage in a traditional darkroom, layering the images with different densities. These montages are created using two or more of my original photographs from my vast library of the past 30 years along with imagery I continue to create daily. Each montage is printed with digital materials, which is then pigment transferred in sections onto the painting, much like the Polaroid emulsion transfers that I practiced in the 90’s. I then work on top of the transfer by painting some of the objects to complete the piece. Each work is then varnished using a UV protective product.
