I am homesick. Nostalgia is a part of life that is impossible for me to ignore. By painting images of the people that have come and gone from my life, I feel reconnected with them. I use naturalistic colors to relate back to the family photographs used as source imagery, though the level of rendering varies throughout the works. Details fade to generalizations. Aspects of the image that may have been clear in the original photograph become abstracted, conveying the distance and haziness of the memory being painted, as well as taking the images from a personal place to a more universal one. The photographs are clear, but memories themselves are hardly ever are. The scale of the paintings both allows and forces me to be closer to my images and to be more careful with each stroke when working. Each mark becomes its own intimate moment within the painting and also invites the viewer to look more closely. The installation is reminiscent of the wall of family photos found at a parent or grandparent’s house. This familiar display paired with the ambiguity of the images invite the viewer to see glimpses of their own memories. These memories are held close, but locked away in a place I cannot return to. They are imperfect and distant. I am homesick.