Throughout my art journey I have found myself constantly playing with movement, texture, and color and experimenting with them to portray a certain feeling or aesthetic. I inquired about how we view children and how it compares to how they see us and how color, texture, proportions, and perspective can portray nostalgia.  The difference in perspective, emotions, and aesthetics. What invokes feelings of nostalgia and why do we specifically fixate on childhood? But mainly, how do we view children and how do children view the world? 

At the beginning of the year, I focused on more detailed portraits of images from my childhood, experimenting heavily with color and texture. For my earlier works such as “Baby blue” I experimented with monochromatic colors, making the background foggy and watery to symbolize the disconnection and longing for childhood. Using only water and white paint over the background I was able to create a contradictory painting that was unrealistic due to the color, but realistic in a conceptual and emotional way.

Throughout the year, I continued to lean into the ideas of nostalgia, but I wanted to explore how using different color palettes and undertones altered the meaning and emotion of a painting and its perception.  I continued painting still life portraits but experimenting with the proportions especially in the eyes, complementary colors, and movement in my paintings. I wanted to make the portraits more realistic looking color wise, but experiment with other aspects that could make them seem more like a memory. 

In “Time Out” I wanted to try to incorporate background objects to make a scene out of the memory. The child is in a crib looking out and almost through the viewer. Through proportions and the texture of the background I aimed to make the painting seem less stiff and more emotionally provoking. While the background did help convey a sense of fluidity, and add dimension to the painting I decided to revert back to the plain background for my other pieces “Terrible Twos,” “Spilled Milk,” and “Wonder” as I felt I should put a harder emphasis on the subject of the painting and the emotion it is displaying.