Subject Area

Art

Abstract

My MFA thesis investigates the emotional and material bonds between the places I have visited and those I call home through painting. Family histories, cultural inheritances, and personal memories connect me to each location, transforming landscapes into repositories of lived experiences. Through careful observation and the gathering of materials influenced by local architecture, landscapes, and changing atmospheres, my work aims to understand how places are felt, remembered, and carried through time.

My work centers around places I have lived and visited, including Los Angeles, California, USA; Dallas, Texas, USA; and San Juan del Río Durango, Mexico. Throughout my life, I have always traveled to see family. Moving between these three locations has created a physical and mental distance from where I feel I belong, a personal struggle with the idea of home. My work focuses on evoking emotional memories of these places through painting. These moments are made into paintings partly from memories and partly from photographic notes. The paintings serve as symbols of nostalgia and familiarity with those places over time.

Engaging directly with the land is essential to my methodology. My creative process begins with fieldwork, gathering information through drawing and photography. While traveling to familiar or unfamiliar places, I collect details and memories that influence my work. From those sketches and photographs, I develop my paintings utilizing mixed media, including pastels, ink, graphite, and acrylic. The substrate consists of paper, medium-density fiberboard (MDF) panel, or wood panel. During the painting process, I am guided by memory and photographic notation, building layers of paint within the composition.

When I paint, my aim is to observe and analyze the places I call home. Through my painting, I also want to create an immersive experience of those places for the viewer. Perhaps they will find similarities to places that are meaningful in their own lives.

Degree Date

Spring 5-16-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.F.A.

Department

Division of Art

Advisor

Frederico Câmara

Second Advisor

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda

Number of Pages

33

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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