In August 2024, I made a small painting. Eighteen by twenty-four inches, linen stretched over wood, a single field of burnt orange over a much deeper umber. It was almost entirely monochromatic. I finished it and then almost destroyed it — not because it was bad, but because it felt too simple, too small, not enough in any direction. I set it aside. I didn't know at that moment that it was the first painting in what would become a series of twelve, and that those eighteen months between that August afternoon and finished work would teach me more about color than I'd learned in the previous decade.
The work started as a formal exercise. I'd been making abstract paintings for about seven years at that point, mostly working intuitively, letting color relationships emerge as I worked. But I was stuck in a certain way — my palette had ossified. I kept reaching for the same warmth, the same earthy tones, and while they were honest, they felt fixed. A friend who is a color theorist suggested I spend a season studying a single problem: how does warmth actually work in painting? Not as a concept, but as material. Not as an intellectual question, but as something your hands need to understand.
So I started with that first painting. Orange and umber. Warm and warm. No contrast. Just the two tones sitting together, letting the eye figure out which was receding and which was coming forward. It was a relief to make something so constrained. For six weeks, I made variations on that theme. Small paintings, mostly studies. Twelve by sixteen. The same two colors. Different ratios, different application methods, different surfaces. Brush, palette knife, sponge, cloth. I was learning how to listen to what warmth actually does when you remove every other variable.
By October, I knew what warmth did alone. But I was bored. More importantly, I could feel the next question forming. If warmth has this much complexity on its own, what happens when you introduce something that isn't warm? Not contrast exactly — that felt too violent for what I was investigating. But adjacency. Difference.
This is when I introduced cool tones. Not unexpectedly — there was a logic to it. But the moment I added a teal field next to the orange, the work changed. The orange didn't just look different; it looked alive in a way it hadn't before. I spent November and December exploring that relationship. Orange to teal. Warm to cool. The balance point between them.
By January 2025, I had the core of the series. The formal constraint was set: each painting would explore a different temperature relationship. Warm leading. Cool supporting. Or cool as the larger gesture and warm as the punctuation. I had a thesis now, which felt both liberating and limiting. The best constraint is the one that lets you go deeper instead of narrower.
But there's a painting in this series that almost broke it entirely. It happened in April. I'd been working well, making steady paintings, feeling the language solidify. Then I made one that was too designed. Too controlled. The color relationships were correct according to my system, but the painting felt solved, finished, complete before I'd even touched it. It was technically proficient and spiritually dead. I remember standing in front of it for twenty minutes, looking at what I'd made, knowing I couldn't show it as part of this work. It wasn't honest.
So I scraped it off. All of it. Back to blank linen. That was mid-April. I didn't repaint it immediately. I let it sit, the blank rectangle almost accusatory. What I realized was that my constraint had become a cage. I was making paintings that fit the system instead of paintings that needed the system. There's a difference. One is control. The other is structure as a tool for discovery.
The repaint happened in early May. This time, I didn't think about the constraint first. I let the color emerge intuitively, and then, once I understood what I'd made, I looked at it through the lens of the series. Did it belong? Yes, but not because it obeyed the rules. Because it was asking a new question within the framework we'd established. The warm and cool relationship was there, but it was urgent. It was personal. It had something at stake.
By August 2025, exactly one year after the first painting, I had nine finished works. By November, twelve. The series closed. I didn't plan for it to close at twelve — it just became clear that I'd asked the question enough times. I'd learned what warmth could teach me. Moving forward meant moving into different territory.
Here's what the eighteen months actually taught: that color isn't ornamental. It's architectural. It's not about making something pretty. It's about understanding the relationships so deeply that every decision becomes clear. When you narrow the palette, you're not limiting yourself. You're deepening your listening.
A collector who bought three paintings from this series told me that she never gets tired of looking at them because they keep revealing new relationships. A warmer day changes how the colors speak to each other. Different light sources bring different conversations. The paintings aren't fixed. They're responsive. That's what happened when I gave myself eighteen months to really, truly listen to what these colors wanted to be.