At the heart of van Son’s newest works is an intricately interwoven relationship between painting and drawing. A graduate of The Bartlett in the discipline of architecture, drawing has served as a fundamental compositional component in van Son’s practice. The preparatory drawings begin and end within the contexts of the canvas. Van Son has recently been developing the role drawings play her paintings, where she became more emotive and challenged what drawing achieves as a painting’s foundation. While the paintings themselves pursue a new approach to a familiar subject matter, van Son explains that “the foundation needs to be pushed as well.” Leaving her drawing visible relays a practical vulnerability which differs from the vulnerability of nude portraits. The paintings themselves depict fluid portraits of the artist and Lilah built through layers of thick paint impasto. Van Son effectively blurs the distinction between model, muse and artist.

Colour is a central consideration in van Son’s expanding visual language. Creams, pinks, purples, ochres, greens and reds fashion a world that is distinctly her own. The considered layering of paint creates rich textures atop sewn and visible canvases. Through a limited colour palette van Son simultaneously arrests her audience while referencing her art historical predecessors.

Van Son is a self-taught painter: her inspirations strike the canvas with intensity. Influences range from the Dutch masters and Caravaggio, who shaped their own worlds through colour and light, to Joaquín Sorolla, Jackson Pollock, Cecily Brown and Chaim Soutine. Van Son’s Señora de Sorolla (2025) draws inspiration from the Spanish painter’s eponymous 1906 portrait of his wife. Where Sorolla painted to capture his confidant and muse, van Son turns her attention to Lilah, her confidant and muse.

Van Son’s work lives at the intersection of process and narrative. “Sometimes paintings feel like pages from a sketchbook, other times they feel like made up stories from a bible.” The works embrace this sense of becoming, inviting viewers to meet mid-thought, caught somewhere between instinct and intention.