The Artwork of Oda Sofia

Oda Sofia is a mixed media cartoonist based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her primary medium is watercolor layered with colored pencil, chalk pastel, ink, and gouache.

Oda grew up making art together with her mother and father in an eclectic home unchanged since the 70s. drawing inspiration from bold colorful cartoon media such as Looney Tunes, Popeye, and Mad Magazine. 

There is so much beauty in the grotesque: Thin veins spidering through bloodshot eyes, the purple and yellow hues emerging through a bruise, smoke billowing out of a cigarette and filling the air, years of caked on dust; comprised of lint from clothes put on and taken off through the generations, dead skin from you and those who came before you. Lingering in the walls and floorboards beneath you. 

Life moves faster than we can control.

My art is a place where I can freely explore my complex emotions around what I can control, acceptance of what I cannot, understanding personal feelings of inadequacy, and coming to terms with our looming mortality.

What can we uncover by submitting to this chaos?

At times I prefer it be controlled, sketching before I make a piece, meticulously coloring and lining my work with a futile desire for perfection. Other times I dump all my chalk pastels onto the paper, observing what colors and shapes stand out to me after I drag the heap across the paper.

Stories reveal themselves to me as I create, imagining a world spanning much beyond the edges of the page.