Elise's Senior Thesis Exhibition

Art work by El i se (Primarily oil and acrylic paintings from my senior thesis exhibit last spring. All are based on childhood memories I collected)

This is half of my exhibit, I had 10 paintings total. (All 28 of the illustrations for my book spanned the outer wall.)

All of them are fairly large, though the tallest is the one of the boy and the vending machine- I made it 6’ tall to be fairly life sized.

“An d

d e r e p She Scam Away”

When I came up with my project idea of painting memories, I began asking my friends for childhood memories. (I had originally intended to use only my own personal memories, but I ran out of those pretty quickly but realized I could branch out to others.)

The trick was getting the right ones though. They had to be bizare enough to grab my imagination. I wanted each piece to be both humorous as well as have a darker, more morose side.

(My rough sketch/study for the piece)

This piece comes from my friend Blair’s sister’s memory of her.

When they were little they slept in the same room on beds stacked beside eachother and one night her sister remembers Blair (while asleep) getting up, hopping over her sister in bed and then saying “We have to go!” in the doorway. And then she scampered away.

“A F

i rst Time f

e v E r o

” g n i h t y r

This was one of the first ones I did. When I began trying to ask for memories, I kept on getting similar ones about broken bones and other injuries.

While often bizarre, they weren’t the kind of memory I was looking for. so to get around that I began to ask for any memories involving food and that seemed to do the trick. I began to get some really interesting tales from that.

This is my friend Gabby’s first experience with cauliflower and she remembers it quite vividly.

(In fact it was Gabby’s idea to try out the food method to find less violent memories.)

She said her dad took her to the fridge one night and the only light that was on was the refrigerator door. He took out some cauliflower and told her that it was white broccoli and that she should try it.

“It Always Seemed

I really had a lot of fun with the process of searching for the memories and then figuring out how to bring them to life on canvas. Trying to stay true to the important details of the story while then taking it in my own direction was the main trick.

� y a W s i h T to Ha ppen

This is my friend Chelsea.

Whenever she and her mom went to the grocery store, they would go by the ready made food section to get lunch.

Chelsea would always get a salad but, for whatever reason, she would always end up dropping and spilling it.

“Rai n d

. . ” d n a s e s o rops on R

I don’t yet have an official picture of this piece in its completed state, but will get one when I can. When it was bought I went ahead and sent it off without thinking of documenting it. So the picture on the left is a work in progress and the one above is it once completed.

This is one of my memories.

When I was little we had a lot of tragedy in our family. My mom decided to breed our oriental shorthair to a siamese and so that that we could have kittens to help cheer us up. We ended up with 6 cats (5 kittens and the mother) who were all types of colors: some were siamesey, others were solid colors like lilac, chocolate, and seal. So this painting is about my memories of being surrounded by cats through the rough times. (If you look close, you can see the child’s feet on the chair)

This is my friend Danielle’s horrifying experience with greenbeans. She absolutely detested them. Danielle says being made to eat them this once was a terrible time and she still remembers it quite vividly.

“T he Greenbean s�

I really liked coming up with the wooden shapes and wanted to do another piece like this, but I never had any other memories that would have worked out well in this format.

“T he Challenge” This is my friend Jake’s memory of how he used to always go to this convenience store with his dad and his dad would have him choose a soda from the vending machine. Jake didn’t really know what the different types of soda were or what kind he would like so he never knew what to choose and would instead stand there with his nose pressed to the glass and stare at the cans.

What was really cool about this one was that when his dad saw it at my show opening, he said it reminded him of that exact memory, even though he didn’t know that that’s what it was about or that I had painted one of Jake.

“T he Showdown”

This is my friend Erin’s memory about a spider.

She said she jumped up on the table and grabbed a hammer to battle the huge spider with (at which point her sister came and made her vacuum it up instead. It made a large “thud” sound when it hit the inside of the vacuum. )

I really enjoyed creating surreal environments for each piece.

They helped set the scene and create the right kind of atmosphere I was looking to convey which had the effect of infusing my own point of view into these memories that I was merely borrowing.

” ? g n i l e e “Ever Get T hat F This was my sisters memory about a rooster that used to stalk her on our farm and is the reason she’s still wary of roosters today. She would walk, he would walk, she would stop and look back and he would be stopped, but a few steps closer than before.

Along with creating surreal atmospheres, I always tried to come up with a different and unusual point of view or way of looking at the scene, while still effectively telling a story, and I enjoyed the challenge of it. (If you look closely, there’s a dot of yellow by the barn door- that’s my sister off in the distance in the piece.)

Show hanging day. The piece on the wall is one I sold as well and has not yet been photographed. It’s about spaghetti noodles that we had been given after my cousin’s funeral. We were given far too many of them and could not hope to finish them, though we felt bad about wasting them, so our solution was to bury them out back.

” l a i r u B “Another

C’est Tout!