
I never took an interest in digital or graphic art until receiving a cache of artwork, mostly half-finished sketches, created by my birth mother, years after she passed. I never knew my mother, as I was adopted early in my life. She spent most of her adulthood plagued with her own struggles, until she passed about a decade ago. Upon clearing my grandmother’s home after she too passed, my Aunt came upon a stash of sketches that my mother created in her adolescence. Going through them was an intimate exercise, and a weird familiarity fell upon me and my partner as we viewed her work. Her hand strokes, subject matter, line quality… even the recurrence of certain design elements seemed all too familiar to my own work. I decided to “finish” some of those sketches, and in doing so, found that digital alteration was the best and easiest way to respect the integrity of my mother’s original pieces, so as to keep the originals undisturbed. Eventually I moved on to editing and graphically altering my own original photography, which comprises most of the work you will find below. For a full view of the side-by-sides of my mother’s work and my finishings of her work, you can skip over to my “Legacy Art” page.
Mushrooms. June 2024.
Colleen. November 2024.