Seona Sommer is a primarily self-educated contemporary figurative artist from Germany. Her compelling portraits promote humanity & diversity and offer intriguing insights into people’s souls.

After finishing her M.A. Seona worked as a German language lecturer in Oakland, California and Puebla, Mexico. In 2000, after four years abroad, she returned to Germany and started painting in 2004.

Seona is also a strong advocate of humanity. She has an ongoing collaboration with a small project that helps children in Tanzania to fund their school education. Other projects are currently in the planning stage.

Her works have been exhibited all over Germany and in other European countries. They have also been published in art magazines internationally. In 2019, she won the audience choice award of the curated international Grand Salon (Bad Säckingen, Germany).

Based in Cologne, Seona works as a full-time freelance artist today.

My approach to portraying people is entirely emotional, rooted in my absolute love of faces and emotions. I begin my creative process by building up a certain degree of comprehension of information in the reference photo. I do not start the portrait unless I can clearly envision and feel the the finished portrait. I aim to comprehend and appreciate a person’s soul with full compassion. My working process is rather slow. I do not believe in quick answers when immersing myself in the spirit of the individual. Applying layer after layer, I work with passion, precision, and lots of endurance. I do not call a portrait finished unless the result evokes the same feelings that I sensed in the very beginning.

I strive to tear down borders and overcome distances with my artwork. While I explore the great variety of different cultures and individual characters, I also zoom in on an individual’s emotions - worries and joys, fears and hopes, sorrows and luck, passions and ambitions.

By capturing everything I perceive, I strive to overcome differences, focusing instead on similarities. The essential objective in my work is to encourage one-on-one human encounters of all kinds and look for common ground. In this way, I wish to make a contribution to the world so that all people can live together in peace everywhere. Through my art, I am a strong advocate of humanity and diversity.