I developed this piece over the course of the fall semester during my senior year. Each element was thoughtfully selected and created for this still life to express mourning the loss of my father. The black and white areas symbolize recent and past experiences in my life that resonate most with my grief. I intentionally left areas of red underpainting to represent the loss and unresolved aspects of the relationship I had with my father. I limited myself to a palette knife for the colored areas of the painting to add texture, definition, and abstraction. With this, I aimed to evoke the complex and misunderstood parts of both my life and my father’s. The blue, his favorite color, serves as a quiet tribute to his essence, while the blanket symbolizes the life he lived before I was born. The color hints at the experiences that may have shaped him, including the choices that led to his addiction. This piece, in its subtle abstraction and delicate realism, seeks to capture my personal emotions and experiences of complex grief that words alone cannot express.