2025: My Year of Chasing Color (and Making Ugly Messes)
Sculpting is my artistic home base. It is where I feel the most confident. Give me a lump of clay, and I can coax out a character and give it a spark of life. But I have a vision in my head that I haven’t captured yet, one I can only describe as opulent whimsy. It is playful but undeniably sophisticated. And in this vision, color and pattern do a lot of the heavy lifting.
The problem? The color stories in my head aren’t making the leap into my finished sculptures. Not yet, anyway. That is why I decided 2025 would be my year of diving deeper into color. Sculpting is such a slow, methodical process for me which means that experimenting in clay wasn’t feasible for this level of trail and error. So I stepped away from sculpting for a bit and picked up acrylic paint instead.
Big Canvases, Big Gestures, Big Slice of Humble Pie
Those first months, I went big: mid-sized canvases, wide brushes, and the thrill of making marks far looser than anything I’d normally allow myself to do in sculpture. It was exhilarating. And then it was… humbling.
I realized early on that my knowledge of color theory was less than adequate. Apparently my elementary school art teacher had steered me wrong. Who knew that mixing red and blue does not make purple? It makes a muddy brown. Over the course of 2025, I accidentally stumbled upon every possible recipe for muddy brown. Those early canvases are still sitting in corner of my studio, depressingly unresolved.
But I kept reminding myself: this process wasn’t supposed to be about creating finished masterpieces. It was about exploration. Playing. Data gathering. Permission to fail.
The Sketchbook That Saved My Sanity
Eventually I realized that big canvases put too much pressure on me. So I bought a spiral-bound mixed media sketchbook with sixty perforated pages. I painted only on one side of each sheet so that if something interesting emerged, I could tear it out and elevate it into a finished work.
My goal wasn’t to create sixty artworks. My goal was simply to fill the book. And I’m almost there. About twenty blank pages remain.
Inside this sketchbook live some truly awful disasters. But nestled between them are pieces with real potential. I photographed my favorites and stitched them into a digital collage so I could see my year in review. Seeing them together, I realized something important:
I am getting closer to the vision in my head.
Not in a straight line. Not quickly. But undeniably closer.
