When I started creating pointillist artwork in the fall of 2020, I wasn’t exactly sure how or why it happened. The dots were almost involuntary.

My background is in writing, and a writer was what I had always been. Scribbling on napkins, toying with word order in the early morning. I lived and breathed it.

Art had simmered on the back burner as a medium that let my hands roam free when they were tired of writing and typing. Art would find me when the words did not come easily, when things were too painful to express more literally, verbally.

I had been aware of pointillism vaguely, having glimpsed Seurat’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte in an art history book in adolescence, but it had never occurred to me as something to try myself until more than a decade later.

In March 2020, I was working for a ceramic jeweler in Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market, peddling hand-painted pins to every tourist who dared approach my table. When shelter-in-place orders descended upon the city and left the market in an eerie, echoing silence, I hunkered down with hundreds of ceramic pins in a depressingly low-light 600 sq. ft. “urban-style” 1BR with my then-partner and continued my work through social media to the extent I was able.

Our apartment was flooded with ceramic hearts and cats and unicorns. I obsessively photographed each product on various backgrounds and fabrics, catching the little natural light our first floor unit received.

Pins were not a priority during the pandemic, that was obvious. It was hard to argue that a hand-painted unicorn pin held value when people were scrambling for the last roll of single-ply in a five-mile radius.

The combined agony of sharing a tiny enclosed spaced with a new partner and the looming threat of unemployment due to dwindling pin sales pushed me to a surprisingly creative place.

I shouldn’t say “surprising”, really, since art is often a product of intense negative emotion. However, in my case, I have often found that stress has a contracting, rather than expanding effect on my psyche, and it’s not usually a resource of inspiration for me.

Historically, I’ve created some of my best work (at least in my opinion) following the ending of a relationship. Not during the ending, when stress levels are at their highest, but after — when there is nothing to do but grieve and yell obscenities into the abyss.

The pandemic was different. In a strange way, I had been mentally prepared for something like this.

In the winter 2016, I ended up in the ER with sepsis and an “unidentifiable superinfection” and spent a very intense 10 days at Penn Medicine getting scanned and inspected from every angle. I was the star of my own Dr. House episode, and I had many eager residents and very handsome doctors gathering around my hospital bed, wanting nothing more than to help me get better.

Long story short, I survived. The odds of that were 50/50.

Despite nearly dying, it was a surprisingly enjoyable, informative experience. Never in my life had I given myself true, unhindered permission to slow down, allow myself to rest, be cared for, without an inkling of guilt.

I was a semester away from graduating with a Master of Applied Positive Psychology at Penn, and that semester was due to start three days after I was released from the hospital, wired up like a cyborg with a PICC line that dispensed antibiotics directly into my heart every four hours.

If you’ve never heard of or seen a PICC line, imagine a fanny pack with a pouch of IV liquid inside of it. This is inserted in the inner arm and goes straight up to the heart. Like a literal straw for your heart to sip antibiotics from. It’s as scary as it sounds. I had the fortune of seeing it happen live on an enormous screen, and I’ll be haunted and intrigued by the image forever.

There was no clear source of my illness. That was the scariest thing of all — the lack of closure, of understanding, of clarity. The antibiotics worked, and I was lucky to have lived through sepsis. Many people don’t.

Ok, Sofya, but the POINTILLISM, you might be thinking…Tell us about why you do pointillism!

The point is that after my illness, I got into the habit of taking things really slowly. One day at a time. Sometimes an hour, a handful of minutes at a time. After almost dying, each moment was a self-contained miracle.

After I was released from the hospital, germophobia felt justified — more than justified — but over time, I began to feel the weight of its isolation.

I was obsessed with cleaning, sanitizing, wiping doorknobs, phone screens, and anything else that might expose me to something unsavory and potentially life-threatening.

Salsa dancing, something I had always derived great joy from, seemed like a glimmering hotbed of disease. The idea of touching others, of breathing into one another’s faces in a sweaty bachata, was anxiety-inducing.

So I stopped going.

Every day became an exercise in avoiding risk, avoiding illness, avoiding death. I had forgotten how to really live. I had learned how to survive so well, but would I ever feel alive again? I wondered. Would I ever be capable of the thing we call thriving?

I waited for a moment when my body would suddenly declare itself prepared for the outside world, ready to fight, to produce antibodies.

Working at a place so replete with germs and dust as Pike Place Market felt like a revolutionary act within my body. A rebellion against my neuroses.

I cleaned my hands after each encounter and avoided touching my face all day, but there was no denying the grime I was in.

It was a point of pride for me to work in such (relative) filth, even if I had to douze myself in hand sanitizer to feel “safe”.

Two weeks before news of the pandemic reached Seattle, I ordered two enormous bulk containers of hand sanitizer. Call it kismet.

And there I was, holed up in a tiny apartment with nowhere to go, and nothing to do but photograph pins all day and wait for news updates.

I was no longer alone in the day-by-day mentality; it wasn’t just me taking things one day at a time.

As unpredictable as things seemed, there was relief in knowing there was nowhere else to go, to be. We were all collectively focused on surviving.

When I had been hospitalized in 2016, a CT scan had revealed necrotic tissue in my lungs. It had been years, and I felt about as healthy as I think someone who recovers from sepsis can feel, but my body has needed extra care ever since. I’d made peace with this, but the pandemic surfaced fears and echoes of trauma that I hadn't fully processed.

I started making art to occupy my hands, to center my restless mind. I had an uncontrollable need to create, to use my hands as a way to liberate my mind.

As strange as it sounds, the pointillism just happened. It was as if my body told my mind to slow down, to take my time to process every shade of feeling that swept through me.

Healing is not linear. My body crafted the metaphor before my mind understood its meaning. Without deliberation, and only with feeling, I stopped using lines in my work.

Art has continued to be a thread through my healing. When I feel lost, I turn to dots. They center me, empower me to face the darker, more terrifying parts of me, all while making something beautiful.

I am tremendously grateful to have art as a vehicle for insight, growth, and self-expression and I can't wait to see what it reveals to me next.