Photos: Carter Fish
Sophie is the rarest kind of artist these days: an accomplished master who’s not been focused on commercial success. Often casting a mold only once and never casting more than a few of her bronzes or acrylics, she estimates having actually sold a total of only three dozen pieces in her whole ‘career’ - including at least a dozen one-of-a-kind works for which Sophie, sadly, has no mold.
Her work focusing on women and the female form - and, yes, Sophie is the model - is sensual and sultry, and conveys the feeling of beauty and power. In stark contrast, her few works focused on men - like her Abyss, in which a man teeters on the edge of a vertical plane - are dark portraits draped in doom and despair. She’s recently turned to painting…and the two large female nudes she had hanging in her front hall were so evocative, her kids implored her to add a mask and a bikini to hide her from public view.
Sophie grew up in Paris, attending the private girls school Notre Dame Des Oiseaux, and then La Tour, and was always interested in art and drawing everything around her. To her parents’ chagrin, she turned-down her acceptance at the prestigious Les Beaux Arts, and determined instead to move to New York and go to Parsons for a design degree. She met her now ex-husband, a Wall Street wiz, while she was working in Manhattan in the fashion industry after college; they moved to London together in 1997; had Max and Alie while living in London; moved back to Fairfield County in 2005; had Asa in 2008, and; were divorced in 2019. Sophie now lives just-off the Long Island Sound beachfront with her boyfriend, Anthony, a ‘Brit’, and two dogs, a Havanese named Coco, and a Labrador named Oakley. She’s every bit as bodacious as her chef-d’oeuvres, she’s refreshingly straight-forward and unabashedly direct, and she can model for her own artwork because she’s also a model of fitness and health.
“I met a woman from Westport named Steffi Friedman who taught me how to sculpt,” Sophie recounts. “I watched her work and was amazed how she started with a drawing and brought the three-dimensional image to life. She worked in clay, which has always been a bit clumsy for me, but she got me comfortable with sculpting myself. Then I took classes at Silvermine with Janice Mauro, who works mostly in wood, but who helped me bring feeling to form, and to portray more than just shape. More generally, in thinking about sculpting, I’ve always been tremendously influenced by the work of the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle.”
“I started working ‘on my own’ around 2010,” Sophie continues. “I did a half-dozen or so works in bronze with brown patinas, including a few of my ex-husband, and didn’t like the dark feeling it seemed to always bring out. I turned to blue patinas and felt I could begin to express a brighter and more positive spectrum of emotions, and I did ten or twelve blue patina bronzes. My bust in blue patina adorned with butterflies was a little bit like coming into the light for me.”
“While it always starts with a drawing or picture, I work in wax with all my sculpture. When the wax is heated-up it has its own energy, where clay seems like more of a blob. And I find the wax to be more malleable and friendly than clay, and don’t like the messy feeling of clay. One teacher once commented that I should clean-up the ‘boogers’ on my wax models - but I love the ‘boogers’. I don’t like perfection. I love the accidents,” Sophie describes her method. “And then around 2015, I found acrylics, and realized I could use my wax models to do multi-dimensional pieces that were not possible with bronze. Working with acrylic as a medium is challenging, and I was fortunate enough to meet and apprentice with a man named Ovidiu, whose acrylics foundry in Queens was well-known for its ability to go beyond. With acrylics I could suspend my figures in space and in action, and use the medium as a part of the sculpture instead of merely substance and base.”
Sophie’s Diver, with a blue woman diving into blue water, suspended half-way into the plunge, and all entombed in a solid block of acrylic that seems like it’s half-filled with the ocean and that it holds the whole clear sky, is sublime. The artistry is striking. Though based in a specific medium, it’s more like a Fabergé egg or a piece of Steuben glass than something from a crafts fair. And it stands on a lightbox which can tint the entire scene in an array of cool colors.
In Splash, the acrylic block is the water only, and the half of Sophie’s diving woman suspended above the waves is not encased in the acrylic block, with the effect that the woman is still in the viewer’s environment rather than the separate underwater space of the acrylic in the block itself.
“The technique for creating this kind of multi-dimensional acrylic sculpture is quite complicated,” Sophie explains. “I start-out sculpting the wax model and that’s my fundamental contribution, but I remain involved in every facet of the foundry as well. I make a mold of the wax model in silicone, then a plaster piece from that mold. I then wrap clay around the plaster piece, and a ceramic mold is made around that clay. The clay is then removed from the inside of the ceramic mold, and the final silicone product is poured into the ceramic mold. The silicone form goes into a compressing oven, and cooks for hours to remove all the air bubbles. The pieces are very heavy - I think Diver is about 100 pounds, and they’re extremely durable. They can be displayed inside or out, and because they look like glass they can seem to be fragile, but they’re actually quite sturdy, and polish easily.”
When covid hit and getting to the acrylic foundry became more difficult, Sophie decided to turn to painting - albeit usually with an acrylic finish. While painting is inherently more two-dimensional than sculpture, Sophie’s paintings are so textured and layered that the subject seems unbound from the backdrop. She uses a wooden canvas, and sometimes applies sculptured relief to the surface - as an example she sculpted fifty different women’s faces and affixed them as the stars in an American Flag For Women’s Empowerment she did as a part of a series she’s working on. Her paintings are bold and even a bit simple, like that of the pop artist Ashley Longshore, but they also make a statement that requires a response in and from the viewer, like Picasso.
I’m in love with the female form and have a message of empowerment, and my art is my expression of that message!Sophie Montagnon
Sophie’s recent pair of Golden Nude portraits have a physical and intellectual depth that transcends the surface of the painting, and a feeling of form that’s more sculptural than outlined. These paintings are more biography than mere portrait. The gold leaf and full-length figure are reminiscent of Klimt, but Sophie’s female figure is a living goddess - demanding that you look right-back into her Azul eyes, and daring you to examine every inch of her voluptuous anatomy. Sophie’s nude is intriguing, inviting, and a temptress, like Botticelli’s Venus or every Vargas.
Sophie started the Golden Nudes by painting a flat blue base with some print words running across on the entire wooden surface; this blue underlayer remains partially visible where the gold paint is applied in a thinner fashion, and is totally revealed where Sophie actually tears away pieces of the gold paint; giving the entire painting a dimension and a backdrop that stands behind the gold curtain from which the nude emerges. The nude is formed without outline, but only in contrast to the gold dimension - something like the placement of one color over another in a Matisse cut-out - making the figure appear to be in front of the gold layer, and coming into the viewer’s space. The nude’s soft curves and depth are created entirely from shaded skin tones and, again, without line. And the acrylic finish adds a magic that somehow brings the figure to life.
Each of this pair of Golden Nudes is also hidden by an elaborate mask, and one with a bikini bottom. These vizards are made from magazine print cut-outs, with pictures of women’s faces. “No joke,” Sophie says, “my kids were home during covid while I was painting these two nudes and objected to how obvious they said it was that the nudes were my self-portraits, and insisted that I ‘cover up’ so they wouldn’t be embarrassed when their college friends came to visit. I added the masks to hide my identity and liked how they added another physical dimension, and a kind of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ psycho-sexual layer. …And I understand I’m not really fooling anyone,” Sophie laughs.
As featured in the November/December 2023 issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazine