About

You have an interesting life story, and I'm making art prints to help you tell it.

Everyone has something that symbolizes a part of their life or evokes a memory. For you, maybe it's the sandals you wore when you backpacked across a continent that summer. Maybe it's the hatchet you use to chop firewood, or the blue jay that sat outside your hospital window. Maybe it's your grandmother's azalea or your father's saxophone.

I had gotten stuck. I knew I wanted to make an art collection—but, art about what? How to narrow it down? And then it dawned on me to undertake a really sprawling and ambitious project: I'm going to draw everything. That's impossible, of course, but I want to get as close as I can.

Drawing "everything"—at least, everything iconic that I can think of (and I'm adding new things all the time)—allows me to get out of my own head and to temporarily inhabit the life stories of other people, real or imagined. It helps develop my empathy.

It's hard to find art prints that are both affordable and personal, and I'm attempting to solve that. For the sake of convenience I've arranged them into thematic collections (for instance, the Lake Collection or the Music Collection), even though I know that real humans don't fit neatly into categories.

I encourage you to think about how your own identity is interconnected with objects, plants, and animals—and see if you can find them on my site.

With admiration for your life story,
Elise Thomason