80's Child Is Full of Woe

80's Child Is Full of Woe

The first thing that arrived was the color.

Without intending to, I found myself returning again and again to the saturated hues of my childhood—colors that echoed Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite, Superman, My Little Pony, Care Bears, Saturday mornings, Reading Rainbow, and a world that once felt impossibly bright.

As the work accumulated, I realized I wasn't painting the 1980s.

I was painting what it felt like to remember them.

Childhood comes back to me in fragments. The fibers of the living room carpet. Stacks of library books. Friday night pizza. Riding my bike around the neighborhood for hours. Cartoons and toys saturated with color. Strange and beautiful movies where magic could be wonderful and terrifying. Bloody Mary whispered into a bathroom mirror. Light as a Feather with the neighbor kids, all of us pretending not to be as scared as we were.

There was magic. There was wonder. There was safety. And there was danger.

All of it existed at once.

80's Child Is Full of Woe explores that contradiction. The work is bright, playful, and alive with the visual language of an 80s childhood, but beneath the color is something more complicated. I was a child who experienced enormous joy and enormous emotion. I felt wonder deeply. I felt fear deeply. I was surrounded by people who loved me, and I often felt misunderstood in the size of what I felt.

The paintings and woven works share a language of layering. Pigment, thread, texture, and time intertwine much like memory itself—revealing, obscuring, and reconstructing the stories we carry.

The title borrows from the familiar nursery rhyme, creating tension between what is seen and what is felt. Because childhood isn't one thing. Joy and loneliness, freedom and vulnerability, beauty and fear can inhabit the same memory.

This collection isn't an exercise in nostalgia.

It's an invitation to remember the child beneath the colors.

Original Mixed Media Painting

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80's Child Is Full of Woe IV 5x5 Oil over acrylic and mixed media on canvas Original
$82.00
80's Child Is Full of Woe III 5x5 Oil over acrylic and mixed media on canvas Original
$82.00
80's Child Is Full of Woe II 5x5 Oil over acrylic and mixed media on canvas Original
$82.00
80's Child Is Full of Woe I 5x5 Oil over acrylic and mixed media on canvas Original
$82.00
Return to Oz 30x40 Oil over mixed media and acrylic on canvas Original
$982.00
I Almost Remember 24x24 Oil over acrylic on canvas Original
$582.00
Huffy Hour 16x16 Oil over acrylic on canvas Original
$282.00
The Child’s Amulet 20x20 Mixed Media Original
$382.00
Starlight Brite 16x16 Mixed Media Original
$282.00

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