Reclaimed Memories

(oil on canvas, completed at St Olaf College, 2019)

Often, I find myself wanting to escape my current life, to become a different person, or  rewind time and rewrite my past. Because I cannot recall the majority of my early childhood,  photos are the illustrators of this part of my life. In a sense, they serve as proof of my existence  as a young child. I do not know the girl in many of these pictures, which sparks a great envy  inside of me. I yearn to leave my world and enter hers. But, the images are not my memories;  they don’t allow me to get too close. They belong to the photographer and other people in and  out of the frame. In painting these images from my childhood, I am reclaiming the memories as  my own while exploring the distance and disconnect between my present and past self.   While making these paintings, I was engaged in a conversation between the photos and  my imagination. I let my intuition determine which aspects of the original image to exaggerate,  enhance, diminish, and erase. Working quickly, I filled each canvas with loose, confident  brushstrokes, unafraid to let the paintings be paintings. I had no decided plan or conceivable  outcome, which fostered spontaneity in my work, whereas limiting my palette ensured some  consistency and control. Mixing my pigments from a tetrad color scheme (two sets of  complementary colors) allowed me to portray the images in an array of playful, harmonic hues.  The colors dance with one another in intriguing ways, suggesting a surreal, dreamlike  environment. Areas vary in description; sturdy features like rocks and tree trunks are more  defined than unpredictable parts of nature, like leaves and blades of grass. The figure in each  painting stands as both a quality of the landscape and a separate entity. While her body is an  objective mass, her head is obscured by a blurry smear of the palette, alluding to the idea of her  presence being consumed by her surroundings.