"I'm Portuguese, and we have a term, saudade, which is nostalgia for a place you've never been or something you've never experienced. Nostalgia for imaginary experiences. I started thinking about that as I started to play with paint."
Breanna Cee Martins (b. 1987) is a New York-based artist known for large-scale watercolors mounted on canvas. Having lost her family albums when she immigrated to the United States, she works from found black-and-white portraits, painting ghostly figures that evoke faded photographs and half-forgotten memories. Mixing watercolor with bleach and hydrogen peroxide, she lets images surface on their own terms, catching children and women on the precipice of a moment. Martins received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2011 and has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad.