Emilia’s return: Artist Emilia Thompson brings her capstone project from Kenyon College back to her hometown

by Rachel Reeves
08/08/2025

Emilia Thompson is in between. She’s 21, a recent college graduate, and back in her parents’ El Segundo home, sleeping in the bedroom she grew up in, with stuffed bunnies on the bed and bookshelf.

She’s in one of those transitional seasons, when everything around is familiar but you know you’ve changed, somehow, even if you feel mostly just the same. To make sense of it all, she paints.

“In college, it’s like, you’re an adult and you’re supposed to figure things out,” she told me over Zoom. “And like, I don’t know what I’m doing. But I asked people in their thirties, do you ever feel like you’re really an adult? And they said no. So that’s too bad. But, you know, I’m thinking a lot about transitions, and figuring things out.” She’s always loved the Impressionists, like Van Gogh and Monet, whose work captures a specific moment in time, with all of the detail gleaned by a person who’s paying attention. Right now, Thompson’s moment in time is marked by this sense of growing up, that relatable tension between stasis and evolution, between playing dress-up and learning to manage money.

“In college, it’s like, you’re an adult and you’re supposed to figure things out,”

She paints tea parties in the grass with Froggy, the stuffed frog, and scenes from the nightmares she’s been having since childhood of her teeth falling out. She paints herself in quirky hats she crocheted to resemble cows and buck-toothed bunnies. She paints the ceramic figurines she and her two sisters played with growing up. 

In one of her paintings, she’s holding a bunch of clothes she recently impulse-purchased.

“It’s like, you’re supposed to be older and wise, but you’re still doing things like that,” Thompson said. In another painting, she’s driving with friends, counting roadkill. “It’s like, that’s disgusting, and silly, and you’re all like, you’re 21, why are you doing that? Well, because it’s weird, and it’s fun,” she said. Another painting, called “Laundry Day,” pictures a glum Thompson sitting on the floor, holding all her laundry.

The artist’s paintings chronicle her journey of becoming. They are snapshots of her experience growing up in El Segundo, with its pepper trees and refinery smokestacks striped like candy canes, and of attending college in rural Ohio at Kenyon, the small liberal arts school where she studied studio art.

She chose Kenyon precisely because it’s “in the middle of nowhere,” she said, in a landscape that felt, to her, at once foreign and familiar.

Both her parents came to California by way of Michigan, and much of her extended family still lives in the Midwest. Thompson attended summer camp in Michigan as a middle-schooler and would regularly visit a friend in Minnesota during summers. She’s always loved the sharpness of the scenery: the supercharged green of the grass, the contrast of clouds against a bright-blue sky.

“It’s a very specific experience, the Midwest in the summer, like it’s terrible weather, it’s so hot and humid it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s also so beautiful,” she said. “The sun sets at, like, 9 p.m. and there’s crazy rain, and they have, like, the best clouds in the Midwest, like, they’re so big and fluffy. That’s one of my favorite things about the Midwest. One of my goals when I got to college was figure out how to paint clouds because, like, that’s the best thing.”

Thompson is exhibiting at the El Segundo Art Walk for the third time this year. This time, she’s bringing her capstone project, the one that earned her a bachelor’s degree in May, to the town where she spent her formative years. In the description she penned of the multipaneled painting project, she calls it an exploration of “the complexities of finding yourself when everything feels out of control.”

“It’s a very specific experience, the Midwest in the summer, like it’s terrible weather, it’s so hot and humid it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s also so beautiful,”

Like anyone else’s, Thompson’s journey to find herself has taken some turns. Growing up, she planned to pursue biology in college and a career as a scientist. But in the summer after her sophomore year at El Segundo High School, she took a painting and drawing class at Otis College of Art and Design in L.A.
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“And I think just from there, I was like, this is something I like doing, and I think I’m good at it, and so I’m going to pursue it,” she said. Her parents, who work in tech and education consulting, respectively, did not discourage her.

Though they are not artists, per se, both appreciate art. They’d been taking Thompson and her two sisters to LACMA and MOCA and the Getty Museum since they were children, before any of them actually enjoyed the experience. Thompson’s father, who takes photos as a hobby, taught her to shoot with a DSLR camera.

“And I think just from there, I was like, this is something I like doing, and I think I’m good at it, and so I’m going to pursue it,”

“Last time I did the Art Walk, my dad was like, it’s so cool that you do something that people walk by and smile at,” she said. “So yeah, I think I’ve always had the kind of support that a lot of people don’t get.”

Thompson dreams about illustrating graphic novels. She made a 27-page graphic novel in high school, the last year of which she did online amid restrictions on gathering designed to stem the spread of COVID-19. She surveyed her classmates about their experience of being in school during a pandemic, and how it affected their mental health, and made a book about what she learned.

“I feel like if I could accomplish anything, like if I could publish a graphic novel, or illustrate one, that would be the coolest thing ever,” she said. She wants to be a graphic novelist, freelance illustrator, or art educator. But for now, she is continuing to paint what she sees: bugs, mushrooms, fabrics, a cat napping on the stairs, the strange items she finds at antique stores.

Until she figures out what’s next, she’s thrilled to be exhibiting at the El Segundo Art Walk and at Gallery 612 in Santa Monica this month.

“If my art is like being shown somewhere, or someone bought it, or is appreciating it, I feel like even those things, they’re small, but like, you gotta take the small wins as much as like, you gotta hope for a solo exhibition at some, like, fancy gallery,” she said. “I think that maybe as long as in the future I’m still making art, that’s good enough for me.”

“I think that maybe as long as in the future I’m still making art, that’s good enough for me.”