Spotlight Artist

Michelle Ramin

Pacific Coast
Artist profile photo

Emachines and Lilacs

Colorful painting of a cluttered desk with portraits, art, phone, monitor, and crystal stones.

colored pencil on paper

Screenshot05312022

Colorful collage of people dining together and children playing on a high ropes course outdoors.

colored pencil on paper

Self-Portrait with DL and Ozma (Starlink Self-Portrait)

Colorful digital collage with paintings, portraits, books, and a video chat window.

colored pencil on paper

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

In times of transition, I often return to the self-portrait. After the past few years of being bombarded by Zoom calls, mobile news alerts, social media pings, and seemingly endless layers of open laptop windows, I chose to revisit drawing with colored pencil, the medium I associate most with comfort, stability, and childhood wonder. Rendering my observed reality in broken yet contained, overlapping boxes has become a form of meditation; building this visual journal helps me process and analyze what’s in front of me, however disjointed. As each saturated rectangle upon rectangle screams with to-do lists, showing no clear delineation between physical, digital, and psychological spaces, this new body of work reveals how completely flooded my brain has become since the beginning of the pandemic. By sketching the virtual world out in detail and playing with the compositions through my personal lens of the everyday, I discover a sense of control and, on the good days, peace and calm.

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