by Dennis Dalman
Three years ago Sophia Heymans moved to Brooklyn, New York, but she is still tethered heart-and-soul, in her mind and in her imagination, to the place where she grew up – St. Joseph.
Heymans, a widely admired artist, will be the focus of an art exhibition called “Afterimage” that opened July 22 at “The Whitney,” a new art gallery in downtown St. Cloud. The free show featuring 16 of her paintings, will stay open through Aug. 13. Gallery viewing hours for the public are from 4-9 p.m. daily.
A reception, with Heymans as guest of honor, will take place from 7-9 p.m. opening night, Saturday, July 24.
The Whitney (also dubbed the “Whit Gallery”) is located in the historic brick Whitney building at 505 St. Germain Street W.
Heymans’ works are mysterious and dreamlike evocations, mainly of landscapes, that combine images of the natural world with almost ghostly traces of the human presence.
Born in Minneapolis, Sophia, daughter of Annie and Tim Heymans, moved to St. Joseph when she was 5. The move was a “natural” because her mother, born in St. Cloud, had lots of aunts and uncles in the St. Joseph area, including her maternal grandparents, Juliana and Jerry Howard, who still live there.
Sophia and her sister, Chloe, who is also a painter, were home-schooled by their mother, who was also a tennis coach. Their father works for the Minnesota Department of Health helping trace down sexually-transmitted diseases so people can be notified to get tested and/or seek treatment. Sophia’s parents still live in St. Joseph.
Sophia and her husband, Paul Spring, originally of St. Cloud, moved to Brooklyn three years ago to become closer to its thriving arts-and-music scene. Spring, who used to do a lot of landscaping work, is a guitarist and part-time music-studio engineer in Brooklyn.
Both Paul and Sophia went to St. John’s Prep School at the same time and both have had connections through family and friends with the two colleges – St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. After graduation, Paul studied at a Texas college and Sophia earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design.
After reuniting in Minnesota, Sophia and Paul moved to Minneapolis, then back to St. Joseph.
During a long-distance interview with the Sartell Newsleader, Heymans, in Brooklyn, waxed nostalgic about St. Joseph and the surrounding area.
“We – my sister Chloe and I – could play outside without permission. We’d bike into town by ourselves, and we’d bike to Loso’s (grocery) store to buy candy. We loved to eat Italian ice at the Meeting Grounds coffee shop. Then, a lot of times we’d bike to the beach at St. John’s University and take walks to the chapel out there.”
Those happy childhood memories and that love of being in – and at one with – nature are the main inspirations of Heymans’ paintings.
As children, those early St. Joseph experiences unleashed Sophia’s and Chloe’s free-spirit imaginations. And they still do – as vital memories. Such images of the past (prairie land, deep woods, lakes, vast skies, hills, swimming quarries) frequently drift into Sophia’s reflections and dreams, compelling her to paint those “afterimages” – thus the name of her art show.
It was the granite swimming quarries in Waite Park that inspired one of Heymans’ largest and most intriguing works, “The Quarries,” which is showcased prominently at The Whitney exhibit.
Measuring 60 inches by 90 inches, “The Quarries” is a bird’s-eye view of water pools and surrounding heaps of granite blocks and chips. On the right are three large birch trees. A mother and her two daughters can be seen walking on a path in one part of the picture. The painting is highly detailed and “realistic” and yet stylized and abstract, evoking a kind of whimsical, mysterious dreamy quality – a hallmark of many of Heymans’ paintings.
“I tried to paint ‘The Quarries’ as more how I feel about it than how it looks,” she said. “I always felt about the quarries that they are kind of scary and mysterious.”
Heymans went through what she called her “post-human” subject matter in painting, doing landscapes bereft of human beings. Later, she worked hard with ways of bringing people back into landscapes as part of nature but never in a dominating way.
One of her paintings depicts an abstract frenzied flurry of ocean waves, and the waves are actually a commotion of squiggles and wiggling that resemble human fingers all a-flutter.
Heymans often uses non-paint objects in her pictures, such as floor-mop strings and dryer lint, to name just two. When she was a girl, her mother kept wondering why the kitchen mop seemed to keep losing its strings, getting skimpier every week. Well, one day, she happened to catch Sophia in the act, cutting off mop strings for her art. Mop strings, placed just so on a canvas, make for perfect tree branches, she said. Dryer lint glued to canvas can create uniquely subtle colorations. Once the under-objects are affixed, Heymans always uses oil paint to paint over them. But the objects underneath the paint give the picture’s surface an intriguing texture that helps draw viewers almost head-first right into the paintings.
In an essay she wrote, Heymans had this to say about her art:
“For the last three years I’ve been living in New York City (the borough of Brooklyn), but all these paintings are rooted in memories of central Minnesota. They are afterimages, like the brightness left on your sight after looking into the sun. They are nostalgic for this place but mostly for a sense of belonging. I wanted to make permanent those fleeting feelings of connection. The humans are psychologically intertwined with their environments, secure together in a strong knot. There is no (human) domination, no possession.”

Sophia Heymans daubs some finishing touches on her massive, mysterious painting entitled “The Quarries.” The bird’s-eye view can leave some viewers feeling woozy as if they are floating far above the scene and about to fall into it.

In her Brooklyn apartment, Sophia Heymans uses half a bedroom for her art studio. The painting next to her is a snowscape that intertwines forms of nature with human elements (note the finger-like shapes).