Preview
Creation Date
2026
Dimensions
11 x15 Inches
Materials
Watercolor on paper
Medium
Painting
Project Advisor
Meghan Sullivan
Year of Graduation
2026
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Artist Statement
I depict the physical death and rebirth of churches around the midwest through my watercolor paintings. In the midwest, plenty of these centers have been left behind for decades and have been overtaken by nearby greenery.
Looking at these once renowned buildings, I feel sympathy for them. There is melancholy in a defunct community center.
However, nature takes over these decrepit structures and gives them another life. The process of being overrun is subtle and slow. A few cracks here, some moss there, until the building hosts a new ecosystem. This turns the rigidity of the christian faith into a more fluid natural shape. The christian faith has been used to impose various strict rules onto the world, so when a church is defunct it is only right for it to be taken over by greenery. Nature is chaotic and unpredictable, it’s unruly but beautiful.
For these paintings, I aim to demonstrate the beauty of communal buildings that found a second life in nature.