Sohail Coelho prints digital art on aluminum

Sohail Coelho. Photo by Nick Pelster.

Sohail Coelho is an abstract mixed-media artist who uses strong feelings of emotion to lead his art creation in his current Mt. Hood exhibit titled “Felt Experience.”

He uses large aluminum slabs as bases over which he prints his photographic illustrations. These illustrations are created to express exact emotions of the places Coelho has visited in his world travels, each having little pockets of exposed aluminum to emphasis his chosen form of mixed media.

Coelho is a Indian-American who grew up in New Jersey, and went to school in Maine. For most of his life, he was working hard to get into business. “You have this architecture of your life, right, and you think this is what you think your life should be,” he said on Tuesday in the Diversity Resource Center. “I realized most of the choices I had made was to make my parents happy.”

He explains how he felt he was living someone else’s life. By 2010, he was working in New York City and making “a crap load of money,” he said. His moment of clarity came while sitting in his apartment in Brooklyn, staring at all the wealth he possessed in his luxurious home, and wondering if it meant anything to him.

When he realized that he wanted more to his story, he quit his job and left to travel the world for a year and a half.“It was that process of deconstruction that found the artist in me,” Coelho explained. He headed straight for Brazil, and continued on to at least a dozen other countries – from Egypt to Vietnam, and to Bhutan. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and lived in Cape Town for enough time to build a group of friends and establish a new life. And when he became tired, he came back to the U.S. to explore the west coast.

He came to Portland on a nagging hunch. “Portland popped into my head randomly about four years ago. I kept putting it off, and then I came here and as soon as I got here, I was like, ‘Okay, this makes sense.’ ”

Coelho has stayed here since. When he’s not creating art, he is part of a program of mentors out of Portland that encourages people of color to thrive in design, illustration, development, advertising, and marketing.

Anyone interested can see Coelho’s work in the DRC, located in the Student Union, or visit starryrabbit.com.

Advocate Staff