Carmen Sonnes is not bashful when expressing  emotions with her use of intense and brilliant color in her paintings.  The viewer is first drawn to her images by emotional response.  Second is the sense of peering into both a  secret world and a warmly familiar one.  The musings, joys and sorrows, in short, the story of her life is what Carmen depicts in oil, acrylic, collage, and mixed media.  Her work on canvas and paper contain drama and verve yet at the same time a sense of stillness and subtlety.
 
The Latino spirit is vividly on display in her very contemporary  depiction of  women, family, and tradition because she renders it all in lush, vivid, and luminous color.  Nonetheless, her work captures the underlying dignity of the Latino, Hispanic, and Mexican people everywhere.  Thus her paintings resonate with the hallmark beauty and strength of Latinas yet encompass the universal experience of millions of women, immigrants, single mothers, farmworkers, working class, and bicultural citizens everywhere.
 
She is able to fuse and transform raw energetic color with faithful use of traditional icons, iconography, and imagery of all that is Latino, Hispanic, and paticularly Mexican.  Being a self-taught artist liberates her to experiment and search unselfconsciously for new ways of transforming a full palate of radiant color, saturate it with human feeling and meaning, and create a visual diary of a Mexican American female in the United States today. 
While her original work is priced modestly and very affordable, it is easily available in print and gyclee form.