Quyen Dinh, 32, doesn’t want you to analyze her art. She doesn’t want you to look at it and think about what kind of statement she is making concerning the role of women in society or the immigrant experience in America or The Way We Live Today. That’s not to say that she doesn’t want to you to think about anything when you view her art. She does. Mostly she wants you to think about her.

In her artist statement Dinh, who sculpts and paints her acrylic-on-canvas pieces when she isn’t working 40 hours a week as a parking-control officer in Orange County, California, writes, “Making art for me has always been pure catharsis … The characters in my paintings are, for the most part, self-portraits of my inner self. So when people see my work, rather than wanting them to think about them, I’d like for them to just feel the very things that bring me nostalgia from what could be memories from past lives, things that give me peace, and also the things that make me melancholy.”

Viewing Dinh’s art is like viewing a visual autobiography of her triumphs and her losses, of her frustrations and her joys, of her very real human emotions, which she inevitably shares with our own. But she didn’t start telling her story until 2004, when a birthday gift she made for a friend inspired her to transition from black-and-white “hyperrealistic portraits” to acrylic paints.

Click the link below to see more of Quyen Dinh’s work.