Summer Trips Series
Summer Trips is an ongoing series of digital still-life illustrations that explores memory through the ordinary objects that accompanied annual road trips from South Dakota to Wyoming and beyond. Each composition draws from my childhood spent traveling west from South Dakota to Wyoming each summer, using familiar artifacts as stand-ins for experiences that remain vivid.
These everyday objects become quiet monuments to nostalgia. Together, they form a visual archive of movement, family, and place. The series reflects how memory is often anchored not by major events, but by the tangible items we hold, collect, or rediscover years later.
Created digitally in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, each illustration embraces the precision of digital media while preserving the intimacy and sentiment often associated with traditional still-life painting. By elevating commonplace travel objects through careful observation and light, Summer Trips invites viewers to consider the artifacts that define their own histories - the souvenirs, keepsakes, and overlooked possessions that quietly carry stories across time.
The series is organized by year, with each piece serving as a portrait of a single summer and a chapter in a larger narrative of family, distance, and the American West.
