Opening Up

What do I feel this way? Dealing with our emotions can be difficult and intimidating. This series explores my innermost emotions brought on by relationships I’ve had with partners, friends, and family members throughout my life. I use color and pattern as a means of expressing the emotions that each painting is intended to capture. For example, repeated curved brushstrokes to capture light and emulate a sense of closeness and understanding between the figures. While growing up, I buried strong negative emotions like feeling ignored, isolated, and powerless because I thought it was easier than dealing with them. I spent my adolescence not understanding why I felt the way I did and feeling ashamed of my emotions. In these paintings, I identify and reflect on instances where I felt negative emotions, in addition to positive emotions like feeling safe, accepted, and understood. For this series, the process of remembering how various people and circumstances in my life have made me feel has been cathartic. It’s given me the chance to understand why I felt the way that I did. Now, I feel validated in my emotions and comfortable visually representing them in these paintings.