Todos es Color

While watching the Oaxaca episode of Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil, I was moved by a weaver at the Vida Nueva weaving cooperative, an all-women collective known for their vibrant and colorful artisanship. 

Her description of the importance of color in their culture made me realize that my own colorful work comes from a similar spirit: “Todas es color.” Everything is color. 

“Es nuestra vida, es nuestro entorno, es nuestra naturaleza. Los colores son alegría, los colores son felicidad, los colores son amor, los colores son vida. Las aves, las flores, todo nuestro entorno, el sol, todo es color,” she says, sagaciously so. 

Per Google Translate: “It’s our life, it’s our surroundings, it’s our nature. Colors are joy, colors are happiness, colors are love, colors are life. The birds, the flowers, everything around us, the sun—everything is color.”

My wife and I, who experienced the wonders of Oaxaca recently, both cried while watching the episode. It’s a beautifully illuminative sentiment, the way she describes their celebration of color. 

It stuck with me. I actually remembered something I watched on TV!

So a couple days later, I went back to the spot in the episode, and recorded her soliloquy. I didn’t really have any sort of plan when I did that, I just knew I wanted to hear it again and again and again...  maybe even memorize it in Spanish some day. I was that moved. Inspired you might say, as that clip turned into the song/PockPoem you hear below. 

I love the way the song came out. It makes me smile. As it was coming into form, I was thinking about the best way to share it, and hopefully make others smile, and kept coming back to this 6’ x 6’ triptych I painted for the Ronald McDonald House in LA, which is still the best thing I’ve ever done with my artistic life. 

My style has moved on quite a bit since, but I’ve never moved on from color. It’s my thing. And the triptych, “If Pigs Could Fly,” is as declarative a statement of that as I’ve ever created. Until now, perhaps. 

So it made sense to me, artistically, to pair the painting with the song. But a minute-and-fourteen-second song needs more than a static image, so I asked AI to shake it up a bit. Which I think it did a pretty cool job of doing. Hopefully you think so too, and hopefully you’ll be moved by that wise weaver’s words as much as I was!