USA Projects

Culture by Color: A Mapping Painting Series

I am an artist with a hearing impairment and and I have heightened color sensibility that I use to understand the world around me. Having been hearing impaired since a young child, color fills in for what I fail to hear - it is a language unto itself and holds meaning that I understand and utilize in my painting. The effects of my disability have become a unique and personal element in my creative process which I feel is important to share with others.  In order to do this, I am seeking funds to help support the creation of a new series of paintings for exhibition, Culture by Color.  

Culture by Color will be exhibited by The State Organization on Arts and Disability within VSA Arts’ Access Gallery in Austin, TX.  The exhibition will help the general public understand artists that are disabled and also support artists with disabilities through a series of attached programming.  I will serve as a mentor, giving an artist presentation to encourage other artists with disabilities within my community.  

Culture by Color will be a series of digital paintings which utilize my experience as an outsider while attending an artist residency in Delft, the Netherlands (2009).  During this time, I worked and lived in an old building slated to be demolished.  My neighbors in this low income residence were primarily recent immigrants to the Netherlands with diverse backgrounds, cultures, and consequently personal color palettes.  I found myself within several layers of cultural difference, as an artist traveling with a hearing impairment, an American in the Netherlands, and furthermore in this specific immigrant neighborhood.  As such, Culture by Color will examine the phenomenon of color as a mapping devise for understanding a culture.

To truly know a culture one usually learns the language. Being an artist with a hearing impairment, I assign meaning to colors and they are often intense because the sounds around me are soft. Using hearing aids allow me to hear sound. I wonder how “correct” this digitally amplified sound is. The same process happens when we use computers to produce color representatives. To engage the same process, I will employ color as defined by Pantone, the world-renowned authority on color and provider of color systems and leading technology for the selection and accurate communication of color.  

By capturing the color schemes in Pantone I am interested in the technical attempt to capture the reality of color. By creating a map painting of the colors I challenge the different perceptions of a place by showing how we perceive color, whether it is the “correct” color we saw or the replacement by digital means. Which one is valid in accessing the experience of a culture or is it even possible?

In Delft, a city known for its blue and white Delftware and Vermeer, the color blue is often found in many places. This shade of “Delft blue” has a Pantone equivalent to my memory of it. In my particular residency, however, since I experienced a multicultural array of colors from the people also living in these apartments (Turkish, Surinamese, Indonesian, and other), my memories of the Netherlands are perhaps more colored than most.  This is a part of Delft that tourists do not know and don’t often think of.  

Taking the digital photograph into Adobe Illustrator I will select the color option tool to obtain the Pantone color equivalent.. I will use the assorted brushes available in this software to apply each layer of color on a digital canvas. The paintings I will create consist of abstract forms using the Pantone colors selected. The painting will take on a density of various colors overlapping creating a sense of visual complexity. Canvas Pop will process this series of 10 digital paintings into canvas paintings. If funding allows, I will produce a brochure explaining the color associations and process of the work created.

I invite you to help me make this a reality and bring this to the visual stage so that others may understand my vision as an artist with a hearing disability and how it brings a new understanding of color as a sensory experience.