Artist Statement

I paint psychological landscapes built from pieces of the broken world around me. Recurring themes in my work included houses, gardens, and portals to other places and times. I grew up moving from place to place and never felt rooted in one place. From this experience, I developed an obsession with “home,” especially of the homes I didn’t have. I daydreamed of places I wanted to live, drawing fantasy floorplans and illustrations. In my paintings, those imagined spaces began to merge with the real ones I’d experienced, creating a personal world that exists outside of any specific time or location.

At the heart of this is my need to make art as an antidote to the modern world. I am seeking some sort of calm or sanctuary in my painting- sort of an utopian ideal. However, painting also helps process my anxiety about living in a world that is creeping closer to dystopia- sometimes the darkness creeps in as an undercurrent of my escapism. Each piece is part sanctuary, part warning since my worlds are all constructed in the shadow of the current times. Gardens, furniture, familiar architecture—symbols of comfort—coexist with unsettling presences like glowing TV screens, smartphones, and echoes of the wider world’s uncertainties. The shifting abstract architectures hint both at instability, and my feeling of existing in multiple places at the same time. But none of the structures actually give shelter, that is always out of reach.

Making a painting is an immersive step into my imagination, and that process is what brings me the most satisfaction. Each work is a place of my own creation, woven from memory, longing, and unease. Transforming fragments of my past into new, imagined spaces gives me a sense of control and turns my experience of constant change into something tangible and meaningful. I hope each finished painting becomes a kind of contemplative experience for the viewer as well—one that is haunting and unresolved but offers a space to wonder, reflect, and escape.

-Bekka Teerlink