2026

Mourning

Gouache on canvas

When I learned my paternal grandmother had passed away, I didn't have the words for what I felt. I had met her only once, more than thirty years ago. What I remembered most was her kindness, the way she comforted me when I was upset, a gentleness I never forgot even as the years and the distance grew between us. I painted Mourning to work through the confusion and sadness of losing someone I had barely known, and the grief of a relationship I never got to have. I chose the colors deliberately, because even in loss, what I remembered of her was warmth. The painting is my way of sitting with all of it: the love, the distance, the wish that things had been different.