About Me

From the Artist:

I’m Sofi Spada. I grew up between worlds — an American Midwestern mother, a Panamanian father with Italian and Latino roots — and I’ve been drawing for as long as I could hold a pencil.I was born and raised in Panama, then went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I studied art, fashion, and design and made everything from corsets to shoes. After that I went back to the Pacific. Movement became the other half of the work: yoga, the outdoors, a body that needs to be used. I taught for a while, lived in the Wood River Valley, and now I’m in Boise, with my heart still split on purpose. Ocean and high desert. Surf and sage. Panama in one hand, the interior West in the other. A little Italian sense of proportion, and a life that refuses to sit still.The drawings come from that split. Lifestyle illustration of the places, clothes, and light I actually live in — surf, mountains, travel, a boho line with some Tuscan restraint. Not souvenirs. Not generic wanderlust. I want the picture to feel like a life, not a poster of one.I also spend a lot of time on the question underneath the picture. What makes a life worth living if you want more than one thing, and you could actually do them? I’ve been walking that for twenty years, across traditions that never quite agreed with each other, and the useful part was never the label. It was learning to hear what was already mine, and to stop treating a scattered mind like a character flaw. The art and that inquiry are the same appetite. Both are about living in the life you have, instead of postponing it for a cleaner version.If I had to write a statement, it would be this: art, like nature, doesn’t need a justification. Beauty is a way back into the world. And it’s damn fun.

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