Painting is not about the painted. It is about the painting.
Colour is not something objects inherently have. It's something that your brain does when light hits an object and that interaction enters your mind through your eyes.
In November 2022 a handwritten note fell out of a book borrowed from the library: "You can't possess reality. You have to live in it."
Ever had the universe tell you the same thing many times, just to make sure you really get the message?
I have been on a years-long chase for wonder. But it felt like I was starting to collect wonder as if it were something I could own. Or rent for the length of time it takes for dopamine to clear from your system and you’re back at it, thumbs on the hunt for another and another. You can certainly feel a sense of wonder scrolling through your feed, pause to like and if it hits hard enough, share or repost it. What a gift you’ve given to the algorithm, to the performance of your identity, and therefore its creation, even if you didn’t mean it, even if you started out wanting to spread wonder and magic and nice things. And then, just like always, you move on. Next swipe, next day, next wow moment in a growing collection of wow moments collected in your saved folder.
I couldn’t think or plan my way back to wonder, or even try to collect as many as I could as if I were back in the Pokémon hunting days of my youth. It happened when I started to paint again. Not easily nor quickly, by the way. Slowly, frustratingly, and certainly not to the speed or convenience that I had become trained to expect.
THE DISAPPEARING ACT (FW26) is here, just in time for the holidays. Notes of: frosty Christmas, fairy tale told by fire, the soft haze of an unrushed winter sunrise, a Millennial goes to the spa for the holidays to shake off their existential crisis with a side of kombucha. A capsule in celebration of the act of wonder as something we do, not as something we know. The beauty and the wonder and the living, in the not knowing.
Featuring two barely-there colours named after painting techniques for how to capture light, a thing that every single day, reminds us of disappearing acts. Because that’s how often we need the reminder.
Contre-jour 10 from the light behind an object, in this case a pink petal a few blocks from where I live on a late summer walk when I felt like I was going nowhere. Stopped to take a photo, my phone couldn’t get it as right and as real as the real thing. From French, for “behind the daylight”. First named in the early 1900s.
Sfumato 11 after the technique for the blending of edges where light meets. Vintage filter is the same colour as fresh glacial water is the same as zombie skin. From Italian, for “smoke”. First named by Leonardo da Vinci during the Renaissance, a few hundred years earlier.
Painting has often been thought of as being about preservation. The irony is that over time, no matter how hard we try everything fades. We all, even our beloved attempts at preservation, hit the dust. That's not a reason not to do it. Maaaaybe it’s exactly the reason to.
The act is the work, the life, the whole thing. By nature, it disappears. By doing, it lives.
Each Colourdrop is poured by hand to order, and arrives with a numbered authenticity card and a mini poem. You can also purchase the accompanying poems as a larger 5 x 7 in. print, as well as commission me for a custom poem. Orders close December 4, 2026.