Portraits

After my family moved from Germany to Texas when I was fourteen, I started noticing trees and people because both were suddenly scarce in my life. At first, I only inked German houses and trees because I wanted people who pretended I did not exist to see me—where I was from and what I was missing. During college, I built many friendships because I did not want anybody to feel how I felt. Since then, I have been drawn to the lives of invisible people. To portray these silent legends with my pastel pieces, I create thick-layered surfaces that burst with their inner charm and that feature symbols and elements of a person’s past, the years between life and death and afterlife. I like building a space where there is circular movement as is in familial generations, a space where death is inviting, sadness is hopeful, and troubles become inessential and forgiven, like the gray mountains of pastel residue on the ground.
I want to be like a tree; connect the roots of hidden people and bring them to light so that humans, just like trees, become a collective of crowns, able to survive and plant new seeds that ignite beauty for the future.