[ Inside the Studio ]

Okay inside my studio, for real this time.

As a senior art student at my college, I was given the amazing opportunity to have my own work space on campus.  I can't begin to describe how beneficial it has been to have my own space, with incredible natural lighting, I may add, to just purge out my ideas. As you will see, it's a pretty big mess.  But as I like to think of it,  that just means there's a whirlwind of creativity occurring :)

My palette, mid-painting. (Oil paint, with cold wax medium)

The chaos.  The portraits on the wall are paintings of the children I met in Ghana.

Painting In-Progress

My work this past year has been investigating the role photographs play in dealing with the loss of a loved one.  Initially, I began working from photographs from Ghana, as I dealt with the grief of leaving these children.  I have now delved into the even more complicated experience of the death of my brother.  He died in an accident when I was nine, he was six. 

The painting above is a photograph of the two of us, about 2 years before his death, on an exposed wood panel.  It's not completely finished.  Once I'm done the entire image will be blurred.  The smearing of the paint, to me, is the exploration of the freezing of a moment in an image, against the transitory nature of memory.

So yeah... pretty deep stuff.  Let me know what you think!