Paintings Lurking In My Parent's Basement

Well, I went over to mom & dad’s on the weekend and took a little journey down memory lane when I ventured into the storage room in their basement. Among all the random things my parents have saved from our childhood and things they are saving for who knows what, was a pile of my mom’s old Trish Romance paintings. Buried under these was a folder of my artwork from high school. The item sitting at the top was the painting below. This was my first oil painting. I guess I’ve always had a thing for portraiture. All of the sketches in the folder are either people or horses or horses with people haha. This painting is from 1999! Aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!! I can’t believe it has been this long – I feel old looking at the date at the bottom of the painting. I was 17 when I painted this – keep that in mind. It is a painting of Method Man – for those that don’t know/remember he is a hip-hop artist and was a bit of a big deal back then! I can’t help but laugh thinking of what I chose to paint and sketch. Most of it was out of magazines featuring musicians and actors so you can imagine… Anyway… I never actually finished this painting, but don’t want to touch it because I feel like some things need to be left alone. I remember when I was in kindergarten and I had written a story about my dog Molly (worst dog ever – ate all of my Barbies’ hands & feet, chased moving vehicles and even barked at the wind) Well my mom treasured this little story and a year or two later she caught me erasing all of the spelling errors to fix them and quickly stopped me and explained that she liked it the way it was. She liked that my spelling showed my age, that it was cute. Now when I look back at my old artwork I think that things I missed or didn’t finish or used a terrible technique show how I grew and progressed. Unfortunately after high school I put down the pencils and brushes. I’d really like to make time for painting. I love photography and I love that I still do portraiture… in a different medium, but this was my first love. This and horses.

all images copyright of Teryn lee Photography  ||  site design by gillian sarah