Is it already spring break time again?

Great Bay Beach, 2'x3', Acrylic on Canvas

This is a painting from a photograph taken in St. Maarten about this time a year ago. My work is mainly based off of photographs taken while I travel. I want to communicate my vision of how I imagine memories to look in narrative form. I aim to display the memory and capture the atmosphere of that memory combined with physical elements from the photograph. This was a photograph a young girl on the beach with this intense beautiful backdrop of Great Bay Beach in Phillipsburg. The important moments in this painting are the linear elements and my working toward a more hand drawn quality to the canvas as opposed to my previous work.

Through the process I found myself fighting and going back and forth from old techniques and trying to strike that balance. This painting flopped in the midst of that because it got too heavy and overwhelmed the space, and ultimately did not achieve what I wanted it to.

As I started out I was disappointed with myself by being stubborn and laying down all of these layers of paint on top of drawn elements trying to cover up as much of the drawing as possible. I fell back on this comfortable way of painting that I have been working at for the last several years in acrylic washes and struggled to show those drawn elements. Every time I laid down a drawn line I had to force back this compulsion to cover it up with paint. It took me several days before I realized what I was doing and by then the marks were covered up with this dense unforgiving paint.

As I mentioned before, my work consists of these memories that have been recorded by photographs but not actually captured. I work with the memory in my head and try to convey that through the emotion I felt and the atmosphere as well as the physical elements of the photograph to synthesize what being there was actually like.

This particular memory from St. Maarten, overlaid as this beautiful tourist attraction with vibrant colors by vacation and cruise and dark, mysterious place to live. There was this little girl that I watched play. She was completely unconcerned with the kitsch vacation and immersed in this calm curiosity with the beach and waves. I tried to capture the feeling of separation from the rest of the scene that I saw in her and that thing that everyone envies after children for.