Behind the scenes…

All-Nighter holds a very special place in my heart. At the time that I was making this, I was diving into the magical world of resin, head first and reveling in it. I had finally found the material that got the results I’d been striving to achieve for years. It was a time of experimental bliss and euphoria.

Contrasting that pleasure, I had just decided that I was no longer going to pursue art conservation as my career. I had been working and studying toward that goal for years, but for a variety of reasons, it wasn’t right for me. While I still feel I made the right decision, it’s something I have grieved for a long time.

This piece gave me a place to process that sadness. Pairing that with the joy of my resin experiments softened the edge of my sadness.

I used the lecture notes from my organic chemistry classes as the base of the painting. You can see them more clearly in the detail images. The designs on top are a combination and interpretation of the bubbles you find on coffee and the connections/structures of the synapses in our brains.