COLOR TRANSLATIONS: MANTRA | 2024 - ongoing
Acrylic paint, wax marker, ink, wood panel
"mantra” in an ongoing series recognizing, reframing, reconnecting, and remembering emotional states using grapheme-color and emotion-color synaesthesia as a mapping aid. The series developed from an encounter with a close coworker. We asked each other “how are you?” during a busy season before responding “fine” as we rode an elevator together in silence. For someone I confide in regularly, I wondered “what was keeping me from telling her how I truly felt?” Initially, I considered 1) time, later 2) emotional capacity, then 3) both.
I began documenting my emotions daily and discovered my emotional vocabulary was limited. I recirculated the same words from morning to evening, day to day. Taking this knowledge into the studio, I wrote a spiral of daily words in white wax marker over a black-ink washed wood panel, the color of my mind’s eye. Then I mixed acrylic paint to my letter-color associations and painted over each letter of a word covering the embarrassment of some emotions while revealing those that sat more comfortably.
As I repeated this daily exercise of similar words on black backdrops, I craved a different sequence of colors visually and emotionally; my inner color palette was repetitive, predictable, boring, colorless. I vowed to expand my emotional vocabulary to include new words and context–-like weather, place, and people–-for my emotions. The images here are the first two finished panels in an in-progress group of nine individual spirals (like those here) and one diptych of spirals. These artworks are reminders of the temporality of an emotional state and my ability to rewire emotional fluctuations by creating a more dimensional, diverse, and, literally, colorful inner world despite word connotation. More to come.
Photos: © 2024 Matthew Vicari.
Acrylic paint, wax marker, ink, wood panel
"mantra” in an ongoing series recognizing, reframing, reconnecting, and remembering emotional states using grapheme-color and emotion-color synaesthesia as a mapping aid. The series developed from an encounter with a close coworker. We asked each other “how are you?” during a busy season before responding “fine” as we rode an elevator together in silence. For someone I confide in regularly, I wondered “what was keeping me from telling her how I truly felt?” Initially, I considered 1) time, later 2) emotional capacity, then 3) both.
I began documenting my emotions daily and discovered my emotional vocabulary was limited. I recirculated the same words from morning to evening, day to day. Taking this knowledge into the studio, I wrote a spiral of daily words in white wax marker over a black-ink washed wood panel, the color of my mind’s eye. Then I mixed acrylic paint to my letter-color associations and painted over each letter of a word covering the embarrassment of some emotions while revealing those that sat more comfortably.
As I repeated this daily exercise of similar words on black backdrops, I craved a different sequence of colors visually and emotionally; my inner color palette was repetitive, predictable, boring, colorless. I vowed to expand my emotional vocabulary to include new words and context–-like weather, place, and people–-for my emotions. The images here are the first two finished panels in an in-progress group of nine individual spirals (like those here) and one diptych of spirals. These artworks are reminders of the temporality of an emotional state and my ability to rewire emotional fluctuations by creating a more dimensional, diverse, and, literally, colorful inner world despite word connotation. More to come.
Photos: © 2024 Matthew Vicari.
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© 2025 Lauren Alyssa Bierly || All rights reserved
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