Contact me if interested in a small edition print of these illustrations.
These are images of Bench Friends, a children’s book I self-published in 2022, thanks in part to a grant I received from the Center of Latter-day Saint Arts in 2020.
As a child, my younger sister wrote down an idea for a story, and I never was able to forget about it. Now as an adult, having lived seven years in NYC, the pandemic hit, and suddenly my sister’s story re-wrote itself in my mind. I knew the story belonged during 2020, a time of social distancing, great change, and heartache. Although the story is fictional, I was inspired by the neighborhood in which I lived, and the park across the street from my apartment building in Inwood, Manhattan. After finishing the story and illustrations, and soon after moving to the Washington D.C. area, I realized this project became a personal goodbye to the city I grew to love so much.
The story is about two lonely 9-year-old girls who fortuitously become friends by scratching messages to each other into an old wooden park bench. In the end, although they cannot spend time together anymore because of social distancing, they find a reason to hope. The illustrations contain no people and only represent the setting of each page, creating a stage for anyone to put themself into the story.
The illustrations I put together for Bench Friends are digital collages of my Remainder Pourproject. It was exciting to contain the abstract imagery into hard edged line drawings, as I brought the story to life. Because of this process of creating illustrations, each image for Bench Friends has an ancestry of other paintings connected to it through the materials used.
