Hunter Mclean

2015 graduate, Art Education Major

Dottie Followed Us Years After She Died
Oil on canvas
4′ x 3’x 2″
2015

The painting titled Dottie Followed Us Years After She Died explores childhood memory and constructed meaning associated with nature, imaginative play, and dealing with death. Reinterpreting the memory of a childhood friend who passed away using representation and surrealist elements, I add symbolic details that extrapolate fact, mimicking the act of remembering itself. This painting surrealistically creates a pastoral narrative conceived as a child seeking to make sense of the world through imagination and spiritual play. Each time we revisit a past event, we are constantly embellishing it with layers and details that may or may not be reality.

As an adult, the conception of my own childhood mind has been varnished with metacognition and matured logic; the event and the cycle of memory will never stop changing. However, the narrative was created using imaginative play, a process that I feel that I have lost as an adult.

**Original image of work currently unavailable**