Why I Never Stopped Coloring
Wanda Sullivan, Spring Hill College, Professor of Art
One of the most vivid memories I have from kindergarten was coloring my “art folder” solid purple and thinking how the other kids were amateurs for drawing pictures on theirs. Here I am 48 years later, a Professor of Art at Spring Hill College and Director of the College’s Eichold Gallery, still obsessed with color — all of the colors. I always considered myself exceeding lucky to know I was an artist even as a small child. My love for color surely had something to do with my mom and her over-the-top, patterned skirts, drenched in always coordinated, saturated colors. We were always on a quest to find the right “lime green” to match her skirt covered in citrus botanicals. My mom was, and still is at 90, a walking/rolling color scheme. It must be genetic because I knew I was a painter before I ever painted. Paint is magic! Nothing thrills me more than the actual physical color that each tube of paint contains. Before I do anything to it, it is already beautiful and it is my job to use my skills to celebrate it.
My dad bought me a box of 96 crayons with the built-in sharpener when I was six or seven years old. NINETY SIX!. I still consider that the best gift I ever received … so many colors! I was obsessive about keeping them in the correct order and perfect. I loved every single color in that box and would spend hours coloring. My crayons and my love for the actual physicality of color was — and still is — innate. It spills over into all parts of my life. As soon as I got my first apartment in graduate school, the first thing I did was go out and buy as many flowers as I could and I packed my little sidewalk by my door with my container garden. When I got my first yard, I planted any and every flower I could get my hands on. I always considered gardening the same as painting, but on a larger scale. The most important part of the flower to me is the color. When I go on vacation in the summer with my family, they all tease me about buying rocks and gemstones that I occur because I cannot resist translucent mauves, magentas and purples. I am drawn to any and all color in the natural world. I would collect small bottles of sky and clouds if I could.
“The craving for color is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Color is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated color with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.” -Fernand Leger, “On Monumentality and Color.” Leger was right, we do crave color. In recent years, I have watched videos on social media of people putting on glasses that correct color blindness, seeing color for the first time in their lives. Their reactions are wondrous, most ask their friends if this is what everyone else sees and many cry literal tears of joy. Our eyes cannot see color without light. I tell my students to pay attention in the evening and notice all the bright colors that make up the world are dim and dull and closer to grayscale but we don’t notice because we are used to it. What would it be like if we only had grayscale in daylight as well? For me personally, the world would have less joy.
I am so fortunate to work in color. It is my language and my metaphorical message in the bottle. My paintings have always been formally based on landscapes and landscape principles. My current work is conceptually based on a concern for climate change. Intellectually, I am looking at ways of blending technology with traditional painting methods. For my current body of work, Synthetic Naturals, I am photographing natural elements, predominantly flowers, through various apps on my iPad. By altering natural materials through the lens of technology, I am mimicking what is essentially taking place in our world. Technology is changing our climate and our landscapes. I contrast the perfect, measured symmetry of my computer-assisted designs with painterly, atmospheric layers of paint. I see these paintings as visual metaphors for climate change.
My paintings are a refuge from my complicated world of technology, schedules and responsibilities. Ultimately, they reflect my desire to provide a loving, safe and beautiful environment for my family and especially for my children. My garden, my home and my paintings form a complete circle and allude to the spiritual destination that I seek in my life. So to celebrate National Coloring Day, I encourage everyone to throw a pack of colors in your shopping cart today and COLOR! There is a good reason coloring is currently a national trend. Every small child loves coloring and making art. Many stop when someone tells them they are doing it wrong, but there is no wrong way to create. Art feeds our soul like nothing else and it is what makes us human. Don’t worry about doing it wrong, just color like you did when you were a child, with joy and wild abandon because, ultimately, we are all artists.
Wanda Sullivan is a well-known area artist and Professor of Art and Director of Eichold Gallery at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. Her work can be seen on http://kudzu.shc.edu/wsullivan/.
