Sophia Leopold

On a wintry morning in 2008, just before Christmas, Sophia Leopold-Muresan was born at Saint Michael's Hospital, in downtown Toronto.

Sophia enjoys the benefits of both a strong Eastern European family and a Canadian one as well.

By the time she was three, like so many children, Sophia, was first attracted to colouring books of all kinds. This pleasant but unfulfilling pastime soon fell by the wayside, in favour of creating drawings of her own devising. The first medium which attracted her was watercolour.

It was the magic of drawing and painting with marker pens which was soon to set Sophia's creativity ablaze. She, if fact, took to the markers like a fish to water and soon attained a degree of mastery uncommon for a child so young.

With each passing day, Sophia's exceptional abilities shone forth as never before. Her seemingly endless inventiveness has been met with joy and approval by her two art teachers who guided her at the time - uncle Vianu and a close friend of the family, Joel, better known as Papa Joel to Sophia.

Although Sophia's family supports and cherishes her creativity, it is she who feels impelled to develop no less than 50 professional drawings and hundreds of sketches in less than a year.  In August 2012, she had her first solo art exhibition in the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood, with encouraging feedback from those in attendance. A year later, in September 2013, she had her second well attended art show at the Eskimo Art Gallery at the Distillery District, in Toronto. In 2014, the Eskimo Art Gallery invited her again to display her work. Since then, she has had many personal and group art exhibitions in Toronto and Hamilton.

Educated in the French language, Sophia had the great honour of being invited to exhibit her work at The Salon du Livre de Toronto in the fall of 2018 and again in 2019.
Currently it hardly a day goes by without Sophia making some intriguing discovery in the field of painting techniques and art history, be it the work of pointillist painters from the early 20th century or the abstract configurations of contemporary artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, Pellan, and Miró, to name a few.

Sophia haunts Canadian art galleries, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she is drawn to the work of the French Impressionists, Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, as
well as Inuit art, and equally she is drawn to the National Gallery in Ottawa, home to exhibitions by Paul Klee and the canvases of Paul Gauguin. Other galleries of interest include the Museum of History, also in Ottawa, the Musée de Beaux Arts in Quebec, Foundation Miró in Barcelona and the Museo Goya in Saragossa, Spain.

Joel, one of her mentors, recently wrote of his star pupil, "it has been an exhilarating journey of discovery for me, guiding young Sophia Leopold on her path to artistic freedom. Rarely have I come across a student who is so open to new, advanced ideas. Adaptable, deeply resourceful and artistically advanced for her age, I only have to guide Sophia on the basics of colour and design and leave the rest to her fertile and surprisingly original imagination. As well as imparting what I may, at the same time I am continually learning from this wondrous little girl. At her many art exhibitions, it is touching to see people of all ages, family, friends and members of her community come out to support Sophia's artistic progress, bearing gifts, flowers and above all, unconditional love for this rare human being with truly exceptional artistic capacities."