Written in response to the CW trip to the new SFMOMA

a confusion of the senses. the painting looks like a song called taxi cab, like the sound of metal clinking against teeth, like what I wish I looked like from the inside.

splattered. new. it’s art in its most basic form – as many colors as will fit onto a single canvas, smudged and smeared and blown together and apart, a paintball fight, someone shutting their eyes and relaxing. color is an exceptional thing.

I sometimes meet colors that are anxious, sometimes ones that are angry. I have noticed that colors on their own are never happy. I think, maybe, my brain is trying to tell me something in that confusion, in that sensory experience.

don’t let yourself be alone. you will be so much alone, but never quite happy. that’s what the colors say.
calm, yes, excited. but never joyful.

that comes in patterns, in the way the paint is splattered onto this canvas, in the way my imagination sees joy in one hundred complementary colors that dance together, in the way a hummingbird’s wings sound like the smell of baking brownies.

home lives in color. that’s what entrances me most about art.

in the end, all it is is music on a canvas

all it is is a place to live in brightness

all it is is childhood and paint-smeared fingers and color, color, color

color everywhere.

by Arin Vasquez