Erin Luman, (b.1977 in MA) is intent on trying not to forget. As a young person, she methodically catalogued her experiences in journals. When she got older, she collected keepsakes as a way to jog her memory; She’d pick up a stone from the ground after a first glance with a crush or she’d pocket a bottle cap to attempt to hold onto the feeling of watching fireworks in the thick darkness of summer.

Eventually diagnosed with memory issues, her lifelong urge to preserve the past now reads like instinct. Her artwork continues this impulse: an effort to capture the edges of a moment before it fades.

Luman’s paintings often begin with a feeling and settle into the details of overlooked or disappearing places and the small rituals of daily life. Whether it’s your grandmother’s century old bathroom sink, a line of beach cottages slowly giving way to the sea, or the morning light across a kitchen table, she paints to hold on—to memory, to time, to what makes a life feel lived.

She works in oils & acrylics on cradled birch panel in her seaside Massachusetts studio, continuing to explore what it means to remember—through the lens of the ordinary and the everyday.