Sonya Radan
Welcome to my world...
and my art
Sonya Radan was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After earning her MA diploma in fine art, she exhibited across former Yugoslavia and Europe.
In 1991 she and her family escaped the war in the Balkans, where she lost her country, along with all her paintings, and her career as an artist and art teacher that she established in Sarajevo.
She never stopped painting and believing in her art, and settled in London, where she has continued exhibiting and exploring different art mediums such as painting on, wood textile and glass, as well as woodcarving, drawing and collage.
Sonya is the member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Art Society and continues to paint and exhibit in the UK and in galleries and museums in many of the major cities in former Yugoslavia.
She has also worked as an art therapist in the UK and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Recently she was chosen to be among the leading artists in the global Eye Programme, developed by START.art, and her work is due to be shown at the Saatchi Gallery, London.
Meet the artist
‘I am a figurative artist and usually paint with oil or acrylic on canvas, but I also create wooden sculptures, which I paint and collage with different materials. I also work with glass and with papier-mâché and paint on silk.
‘I have gone through many changes in my life and, in the process of creation, I have always loved discovering new mediums and different forms of artistic expression.
‘There is a continuous thread though running through my work: I usually paint women and, in contemplating them, I strive to reveal and affirm female identity through different phases of life.
‘Inspiration is a miracle. Sometimes I find it at my local swimming pool, sometimes in pieces of wood that I find in a skip; sometimes it comes from memory, or from Lockdown.
‘I have developed as a person and the artist I have become, and am no longer afraid of being ‘heterogenic’, as I used to be called at university. I just follow my gut feeling.
‘How and why, we create something can’t always be explained, but I know I have a constant need to do it and there’s no way to give that up. My work will always reflect my inner state; it is part of the lives I am living.
‘For me art is a way of life, not a way of decorating life.’
