Opening hours: Tues to Sat 10.30am to 4.30pm
Sophie Velzian
Sophie Velzian is a landscape and abstract artist based by the Helford River in Cornwall. She graduated from the Slade School of Art and worked as a user experience designer before returning to her passion for painting.
She is influenced by the masters of landscape art, such as Peter Lanyon, Cezanne, Monet, and Turner. From her studio by the Helford River, she paints the Cornish coast with its serene water, rugged coves, and enigmatic woods of pine trees, using oils and cold wax medium on Arches Huile paper to create paintings that glow with colour and emotion.
She loves to swim in the cold water at sunrise and walk her rescue dog along the shore and gets much of her artistic inspiration from these experiences, with signature colours of tangerine and the blush pink of dawn. Her aim is to share her joy of painting and the beauty of the places she paints.
Landscape and Seascape Abstract Art
Sophie’s paintings are a fusion of landscape and abstraction, capturing the essence of the Helford River and the Cornish coast in oils and cold wax. She enriches her semi-abstract artworks with poetic sonnets that invite the viewer to explore the mystery and beauty of nature.
Our Favourite Pieces
Each piece is beautifully handmade and unique, we have selected a few of our favourites to show you.
My Helford Sketchbook series of paintings
Sophie’s “My Helford Sketchbook” collection of paintings emerged from a year of plein air painting where she found solace and joy in being out in her local landscape while dealing with her mother’s dementia diagnosis.
This inspiration for Kaleidoscope Bay: “Deep blue bay. The water looks unreal, made up, too good to be true. How can it be so inky? Mesmerising, the colour shift from the pink sky to the shallows confounds, playing with the space, rendering the trees crimson in outline. A lone boat is moored in this kaleidoscope.”
The Place I Like to Sit
This painting is part of a new body of work started in January 2026 based on that sketchbook, scaling up from the original gouache paintings and focusing on colour layering and mark making to capture the mood, and a sense of place and time.
The original sketchbook inspiration: “The deep green reflections gather at this end of the beach, wrapped around the rock slabs that skirt the bay. I am bathed in the greens, calming, rejuvenating. I have the place to myself, I rejoice.”
