Paintings of People We Don't Know

My thesis consists of a series of paintings, which are being exhibited in Wesleyan’s Zilkha Gallery, and this essay. The paintings are small-scale oil paintings of other people’s family photographs. The essay presents a record of my thoughts concerning the work as well as the subject matter I wished to address by making it. The latter is broken up into two primary sections, one on family photography and one on the stranger as both an abstraction and a reality. I examine the practice of taking and keeping photographs and the tendency to romanticize the stranger as ways in which people create meaning, and compare these to the act of making paintings. I question whether any of these pursuits are valid.