My whole life, I have been the “artsy” one in my family.
I was always drawing on the back of restaurant placemats, filling sketchbooks with Disney characters, and making an unnecessary amount of sand art masterpieces. I would spend hours on a project, sitting in my room trying to get every detail right. Drawing was my main interest, but I tried other mediums too, like painting, photography, sculpting and even filmmaking. In middle school, I spent many afternoons editing amateur slideshow/videos, including an abundance of awkward pictures and videos set to music.
The summer before my sophomore year of high school, I decided I wanted to make a video for my Mom for Christmas (my excitement for Christmas time had me planning months ahead). Choosing a song was the easy part because there was one that fit perfectly, The Best Day by Taylor Swift, as it described the best days a mother spends with her children. Gathering footage was a lot more time consuming though. I spent days watching home movies, video-taping the TV (because it was the easiest way to get a VHS onto my computer), and editing while my mom was at work. I worked until I thought the pictures and videos matched up perfectly.
Unfortunately, come December, my Mom passed away suddenly, just a few days before Christmas. She never got the chance see my video, and we ended up playing it at her funeral instead.
Although this was not my intention when making the film, it helped my sisters and I a lot during those days. We watched it all the time, playing back the memories of our great childhood with our amazing mother. The attachment we felt to this video got me thinking about other ways I could keep my Mom’s memory alive through my artwork. I wanted us to be able to focus on the happy and healthy days instead of the last few when we watched my Mom suffer. In AP (Advanced Placement) Studio art class, we were told to choose a concentration for pieces we would submit at the end of the year. I entitled my body of work “Memories of Mom,” attempting to recreate some of the moments of her life as a wife and a mother.
I went through old photographs and picked out a few that I thought best represented the love and happiness that my mom always carried with her. Using different mediums, I began recreating the scenes or moments of each. Some were meant to be very realistic recreations of the photos, while others simply represent certain memories. The first piece I did was of my Mom on her wedding day. The photo was taken right after she put her dress on and you can see the excitement and complete joy on her face.
One of my favorite paintings is my recreation of a scrabble board. My mom, sister and I would play scrabble all the time at home, especially during the summertime. This board is drawn to scale but is completely flat, even the scoreboard on top was painted on. The scores seen in the picture, seen here, were the real results to a game we played (I chose certain words to fit my theme though). I love that even without any portraits involved, there is still a piece of all of us in it.
Making these pieces helped me to focus on the good times while my family and I attempted to understand a world without Mom. Everything had changed in an instant, but my memories never would.
Soon after my Mom’s passing, we started seeing ladybugs everywhere, a rather uncharacteristic occurrence in the dead of winter. We took this as her way of telling us that everything was okay and that she was still with us. Even today, any time my sisters and I see a ladybug, we send a picture to each other. I thought this element was important to include in my concentration because even though my Mom is not here physically, her spirit still is. I recreated a few of the first photographs we took of these spotted angels. (Check out one of these pieces here)
The process of creating this work helped me through a few very hard days, and the finished products helped me through many, many more. Knowing how much love my mom shared with each of us, and how much love went into making each painting and drawing, makes them even more special. That same feeling my sisters and I felt while watching the Christmas video was carried through, even years later, in my AP Art work, and it continues to comfort us today.
