Grace and Gratitude
I’m Sophia, the blonde girl you see in many of Jeffrey T. Larson’s paintings. I am his youngest daughter and have recently stepped into an administrative role on the business side of Larson Studios. We are trying out this new email platform with the intention of giving you – patrons, artists, and collectors – a sneak peak behind the scenes of my dad’s life and studio as well as notifying you of upcoming shows and events. Newsletters will cover a wide array of topics including paintings that are currently on Jeffrey T. Larson’s easel, blurbs and stories behind works done in the past, and portions of his student lectures to name a few.
Today to kick us off, I thought I would share how I transitioned into this role and feature two pieces my dad completed this summer, “Grace” and “Gratitude”.
After graduating college and planning our wedding, my husband and I moved to Peru to teach community health in the jungle. Our plan was to live there for at least two years before coming back to the states to figure out what was next. Around the fifteen-month marker of our time in Peru, COVID hit and life got crazy. We lived eight hours away from an international airport (separated by a mountain range) and the tribe that we were working alongside used the one defense mechanism they had at the time against the virus – close off all access into their communities. The Peruvian government acted quickly and within 24 hours completely shut down the country and mandated quarantine for everyone. In 36 days of quarantine, I only stepped outside twice and I think my husband then realized we had two options: go crazy or go home for now. We chose the latter, which ended up being an intense process of repatriation. Long story short, we eventually found ourselves living with my parents in northern Wisconsin, hoping this whole pandemic would last a month or two and we could head back to Peru by the end of summer. Like so many of you, we had no idea how plans would change.
One perk of being an artist’s daughter is guaranteed part-time work on any sunny day, especially if you can stand still around 7am. I grew up modeling for my dad in the summertime with my mom and siblings. When we weren’t traveling, my dad would set up our box TV with a built-in VHS player out in the middle of a field and we would get chocolate kisses by the hour – what a gig. Although a change in currency was requested over the years, I always enjoyed conversations and quality slow-time as a family. I hadn’t lived at home in eight years (and never with a husband) but we were SO thankful for a place to stay and quality time together. Of course, it didn’t take long for my dad to convince me to join him out at the clothesline, 7am, with coffee and a podcast.
“Grace” and “Gratitude” were painted as companion pieces, a duo ideally designed to hang alongside one another but, of course, may be collected separately. For me, these two pieces depict two responses that I believe we’ve all experienced in one way or another over the past year – letting go of things that are out of our hands and thus finding ourselves in bountiful gratitude for what we do have.
So here we are, in northern Minnesota where the climate is quite different than the Amazon, not where we thought we would be, but in awe of how life evolves and organically transforms into what it was meant for. I am absolutely thrilled by this opportunity to represent Jeffrey T. Larson, my dad, and am so looking forward to meeting with and hearing from many of you. If you know of anyone who may be interested in reading these publications, feel free to pass on their contact information to me and I will add them to our list.