There are equations on the wall of Dali Schonfelder’s London studio. Not the vague approximation of mathematics you sometimes find deployed as an artistic motif, but numbers she actually understands — and loves.
“I actually really love maths a lot,” she tells me. “I remember in high school, I would memorise hundreds of digits of pi.” There was also the occasion when a teacher promised her an A if she could become the fastest in the class at solving a Rubik’s Cube. Schonfelder effectively abandoned the semester and concentrated on the cube instead. Her time? Around 41 seconds.
This matters because once you start looking around her studio, structure is everywhere. Buildings, maps, musical notation, Fibonacci sequences: systems through which an apparently chaotic world can be organised, measured or understood.
Schonfelder is a London-based painter of Dutch and Australian heritage who grew up between the Netherlands and Bali (where she painted with Mersuka Dopazo), before studying at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her paintings have already travelled considerably further, entering collections in the UK, Singapore, Bali, Miami, Australia, Germany and New York.
But biography only gets you so far. The more interesting question is why someone raised in what sounds like an almost impossibly free environment should become so attracted to order.