Paintings

The 5 paintings below were created in the spring of 2019 as part of my concentration in my AP art class. The focus of this project was to explore how memory and emotion can be visualized together. Emotion is the quality set deep within our DNA, it’s what makes us human. Memory is the quality that allows us to keep these emotions, it allows us to not only remember our experiences, but how they made us feel, and that has a huge effect on development of the individual’s personality. Without memory and emotion together, we would not learn from painful past experiences, and we would not remember acts of love and charity from meaningful people. For me traveling, even a small 5-minute drive, can bring up these feelings of happiness and sentiment. Through these paintings I depicted moments I captured when I felt an emotion including happiness, deep sadness, excitement, relaxation, and nonchalant. The viewpoints of these landscapes are tilted, blurred in some spots, or have exaggerated colors to emphasize how memory distorts and can be inaccurate, however the emotion you feel when remembering is the most important.

The 7 paintings below were created during the year of 2020. The top 6 were pieces created for my sister for her birthday and the bottom picture is an image of the Chicago skyline created for my brother. I love painting anything to do with nature, it feels very freeing for me. The style that I look to for inspiration is from the Impressionists. I really love to paint with loose strokes and I strive to use a variety of color in my work to emulate the way light affects color.

These last 4 paintings were created during the summer of 2022, while I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. I took an oil painting class while abroad for 4 weeks in which we started out focusing on still lives, moved to landscape painting, and lastly a copy of a portion of a master painting. I had only worked with oil paint during my senior year of high school, so while I had some experience I also had a lot to learn. The painting in the first row on the left is the first one I made during the class. The purpose was to get used to the medium and explore how it can be used. I feel like there was a lot of growth between that painting and the second painting which is pictured to the right. In the second painting their is so much more depth to the sculpture, flower, and bottle. The two paintings on the bottom row are the ones I am most proud of. The one on the left is a painting of a space within the Boboli Gardens and the second painting is a portion of the master painting of the Madonna and Child by Murillo. I loved this experience and will hopefully work with oil paints more in the future.