Creative Portfolio

An imagined face, a life un lived, a memory that stayed.

Watercolor on paper | 2017

I called this painting Dawn.

In 2017, I painted it from a photograph of my mother when she was young. It wasn't an exact portrait, but the features were there, enough for someone who knew her to recognize a familiar face.

But this painting was never meant to be just a portrait of my mother.

Dawn was the name I gave to a sister I never had the chance to meet. She died before she was born, a loss my mother suffered because of eclampsia. I never saw her, but my other sister did. She once told me that, had our sister lived, she might have looked something like the young woman in this painting.

And so, I imagined her.

I gave her a face, a presence, and a name. Through watercolor, I painted a possibility—a glimpse of someone who existed in our family's story, even if she never got the chance to become part of our lives.

Years later, in 2022, my mother passed away.

Since then, I have tried to paint her again, but somehow, I cannot. Perhaps some memories are too close to the heart to be translated into paint. Perhaps the hand knows what the heart is not yet ready to revisit.

Yet whenever I look at Dawn, I remember my mother.

What began as an imagined portrait of a sister has become a keepsake of them both. One I never knew, and one I loved and lost. Two lives connected by a story I can never fully know, held together in a painting I made without realizing how much it would one day mean to me.

I still see my mother in this face. I still wonder about the sister who might have been.

And perhaps that is what art sometimes does. It gives shape to what we cannot hold, a face to what we can only imagine, and a place for memories to remain when the people we love are no longer here.

Dawn is more than a painting now. It is a small, quiet piece of my family's story, preserved in watercolor.