At the start of my college junior summer, I painted what is still probably my single favorite thing I’ve painted. I was staying with my aunt for a couple days before starting my internship, and I took the opportunity to paint with my artist cousin Sonika didi. She’s absolutely fantastic and paints pieces for galleries while also working in art education. See her pieces here!
We looked at a variety of modern artists to get style inspiration, and ended up settling on Chuck Close. We didn’t feel we could quite capture the surprising level of realism he managed to achieve, but it would be fun to try painting with a diagonal grid texture anyways. I was very happy with how mine ended up turning out! I had lots of fun altering the shades of the individual cells on both the background and dinosaur to indicate the light source being present on the top right of the painting. Sonika didi’s cat was also really cool!
A few months later when I had returned to school for the fall semester, a new student lounge on campus (the Banana Lounge) put out a call for student art. I submitted a pic of my dinosaur and had it accepted! I was sad to have it leave my dorm room, but I was so excited for a chance to have something I created be on display for others to see.
To make up for the loss of my painting from my room, one of my cousins Avni recommended printing custom stickers, which I ended up putting on my water bottle and laptop and giving to various friends. The below picture shows a great example of a mint condition one I put in on my new laptop in mid 2023 vs a well-loved one that had lived on my water bottle in early 2019.
I graduated college, moved to NYC for a job, moved back to MN for covid lockdown, got a new job in Boston and moved there, and finally realized, once the current crop of seniors graduated from MIT, I’d lose personal connection to the banana lounge team and potentially lose the ability to reclaim my painting.
Thankfully, one of the coordinators of the space, Zoe, had been a freshman on my floor when I was a senior, so I was able to reach out to her and get my painting back. Coincidentally, my work asked for office art around this time, so my painting went straight from MIT to Reverie Labs!