sonya bowling

Savannah , Georgia, United States

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@rt!s+ B!0: I was born in Wilmington North Carolina to a young mother and hard working middle class father eight years my mother’s senior. We lived with my mother’s parents in Boiling Spring Lakes North Carolina for 3 years, until my parents bought a run down house in a neighboring town Bolivia, North Carolina. Since the house was run down we lived in a fifth wheel camper while my father worked on weekends and at night to fix up the house and make it a home for my mother and myself. This was my first experience with hard work and turning something less desirable into something that would house my dreams, my memories and my creativity. A place where I would grow up, and eventually leave. My parents had no other children this would be another notch in my belt of creativity. Having no other children to play with I made up a world to live in, a world full of art driven by creative force. This was the beginning of my artistic journey. My uncle was an artist painting signs and doing lettering around the neighboring counties. He having three little girls would bring them over to play with me while he worked in our yard on his signs. He noticed that rather than play with my cousins I stood behind him watching, inspecting, being curious, he handed me my first paintbrush at four years old. In elementary school I took my first art class in third grade. My first painting that is now lost, was three lambs on a hill. My art teacher put it in a show, which I knew nothing about and returned it to me with a third place ribbon. From the years between my first art class and my next one would be seven years. Where I again picked up a paintbrush and with encouragement from my father did not put it down until his death in 1997 two years later. In that time I read books on art and artist and began my journey into being the artist I am today. My father met his end by the hands of a heart attack while he and I had dinner together. After his death my mother lost interest in all things that was her life before with him, which included me. She slowly removed herself from the home we built as a family. And I did not create for some years to come. I began courses at a community college to stay close to home because she needed me and abandoned all hope of going away to a university to study art. At that time I had no car and at times had to hitchhike to and from school. Then my grant ran out, with two classes left I had no choice but to get a job at the only place I could find ride to. I cleaned toilets for a year. All the while taking care of the house and being the caregiver for my thirteen year old cousin who was without a home. I was living a life that others had abandoned and no longer wanted. I was the only one who would pick up the pieces and take others discarded lives and make it into my own. During this time I took a basic photography class and with my instructors influence entered a local photography contest, where I took home honorable mention. Two months after my cousin turned 18 I decided that I needed to pick up the pieces of my life that no one was tending to, my art. I left that life and came to Savannah Georgia with my boyfriend in hopes of attending Savannah College of Art and Design. Working on art when I had the time and the money to put in it. After a rejection from the school, I decided that I did not need it, that I could work just as hard in my home and learn as much as I could from trial and error and staying up late and being driven than I could from any art school. I began to pride myself on being self taught being unspoiled by others influence and throwing the art “rules” out of the window and producing work that just feels right. I used to be just an oil painter but financial woes have put a halt on that medium. I have done everything I can to keep working even though I know I can’t afford it. I create on broken down cardboard boxes and wait for Savannah College of Art and Design students to graduate so I can dig in garbage cans of their discarded lives, to keep mine afloat. I am determined that one day with hard work all of the pieces of others lives that I have collected will make up the life that I desire which is to be an artist.

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