Senior Thesis

My thesis immortalizes the life of my grandmother, lovingly called Mama, who passed in the summer of 2018 before entering college.

Using her wedding band as a recurring symbol, I delve into portraits that represent and recreate my relationship with Mama. I emulate religious iconography and use transitional times of day to convey divine rebirth beyond mortal death. I am greatly inspired by the compositions, death symbolism, and landscape works of prolific surrealists like René Magritte and Georgia O’Keefe.

My thesis contemplates the emotional nature of memories lost to time. My landscape scenes work to reassemble settings I remember vaguely and strive to preserve, all without the ability to return to these locations. By connecting to these places in a meditative creative practice, I reconstruct settings from my memory by working with family pictures and real estate photos of where she lived throughout my childhood. This process fabricates a space that is eternally paused in time and feels whole to the eye and spirit.

Painting these landscapes is an act of love that revives cold, emotionless real estate images and Immortalizes scenes that no longer exist, creating a new reality of sacred spaces which are both infinite and halted in time.

All paintings are completed with gouache on wood panels of various sizes.