La Reverie Painting

My oil paintings explore land stewardship and the importance of ancestral memory in our relationship to land, animals, and plants. Motivated by the loss of my family’s farm and my experience as the last generation in my family to steward the land, I combine portraits of animals overlaid with flowers to represent the ties between past and present and highlight the importance of ancestral lineage in the food system. My work is a visual representation of humans’ ability to emotionally connect with beings that are not human and seeks to remind viewers of their own unique and cultural relationship with land. La Reverie features a sheep, which my great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and myself have all farmed. The sheep represents connection to the land and wisdom passed down through generations, and each flower overlaid on top of the sheep is either native to the land our family farmed, or could be found on the land. The black background serves to add a dreamy, nostalgic sense to the piece, and the square composition grounds us in the contemporary moment.