My thesis project examines the bonds and distances between my mother and I through ideas of beauty, purity, and nourishment. These are just the bits and pieces of what I have inherited, and today my inheritance comes to you as four paintings. Storytelling, art history, and the practice of painting have allowed me to transform my own memories and my mother’s memories ‐ through the lens of my imagination and interpretation ‐ into paintings. It has also been an opportunity to embrace who I am as the daughter of a Salvadoran woman, to not forget the places I have come from, and to remember the experiences I have had as an American Latina woman which have made me into the person I am today. Not only do these paintings account for my experiences and for my mother’s, they also document an embrace of my individual womanhood and feminist philosophy. All of this, of course, was allowed by and infused with the experience of painting: the magic of creation, the ability to materialize the imagined, and the most tender documentation through pigment and oil.