Coloring Fanatic

Today I listened to a podcast which had interviews with Heyd Fontenot about his paintings and Kerthy Fix about her documentary about Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields.

I do not consider myself to be a visual artist, but hearing people talk about their art made me wonder why have I stopped coloring.

I am someone who likes to color. Before college, I was scared of drawing because nothing I did looked realistic. My brother was always drawing. Me? Too scared to try.

As an undergraduate I wrote in a diary and started writing even more once I got my first boyfriend. There was no one to tell my secrets to except a blank piece of lined paper. When I finished my first journal, I bought a sketchbook to use for my thoughts and the empty white pieces of rough pressed wood pulp spoke to me, "Fill us with color."

At the dollar store I saw a box of color, 64 crayons with a pencil sharpener included in the side of the box. "Color." I listened and at boring football games and never ending graduations I colored two dimensional shapes, filling page after page with colors combined in ways that were super ugly, unbalanced, pointless, just coloring for the sake of coloring, feeling the paper under a crayon.

Then I found oil pastels and loved the new vibrancy and brightness that Crayola never seemed to catch.

I became obsessed with color, coloring the same scenes over and over again, spreading reds, blues, black all over pages, fingers covered with colorful oil and sore from the friction of trying to fill huge pages of paper, tables marked with dashes of yellow and green, walls being filled with paper colorfully smeared, smeared with my obsession.

Why do I color? Why in China have I lost my obsession?

Listening to today's interviews with the artists, I felt something is missing. Maybe tonight I should put down my knitting and spend some time coloring.