Erin Luman, Gloucester, MA artist, paints New England beach cottages and the city around her

Erin Luman was born in 1977 in Western, Ma and has always had a fascination with memory. As a young person, she was intent on cataloging her experiences in journals. In her teens, she’d pick up a stone from the ground to remember a first glance with a boy or she’d pocket a bottle cap to remember the feeling of watching fireworks in the thick darkness of summer. She was and remains a collector of memories and this inclination has carried through into her artwork. 

“I paint to remind you that you’ve been there before. A first apartment. Your Grandmothers perfect vintage pink bathroom. The tiny summer cottage near the beach. You rode past these places on your childhood bike. These houses live along side us, silent beings holding our memories.”

Luman uses Acrylic paint on cradled wood panel in her seaside Massachusetts studio. After two sold out shows with Gloucester’s Long Beach cottages she moved on to capture the beach cottages of Plum Island, off of Newburyport,MA. Working mostly from photographs, she preserves her subjects in paint so as the days move on and the oceans creep up, her paintings stand.