“Like sweeping the floor or doing the dishes, painting is a daily, meditative act that allows me to better live and appreciate my everyday life. It is between the strands of my wife’s hair when electrified in late afternoon light, or nestled deep in the knit stitch of my daughter’s faded periwinkle blanket that I find my brightest moments of inspiration.”
CAS
Colby A. Sanford
Colby A. Sanford is a figurative realist painter with a heart for finding poetry in the prosaic. Growing up in an unconventional home, he was encouraged to paint on the walls of his bedroom and later lived in a yurt. His most precious moments are spent at home with his wife and soon-to-be three daughters, often baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Sanford paints in his home at the base of the mountains in Provo, Utah - often in the living room and occassionally in his basement studio. He paints using a restricted acrylic palette on wooden panels, as he works to highlight the beauty in the mundane. Many works are paired with short-form poetry that serves to further parse extraordinaries from the commonplace of everyday life.
“Like sweeping the floor or doing the dishes, painting is a daily, meditative act that allows me to better live and appreciate my everyday life. It is between the strands of my wife’s hair when electrified in late afternoon light, or nestled deep in the knit stitch of my daughter’s faded periwinkle blanket that I find my brightest moments of inspiration.
The human figure is a universal doorway and the starting point for me to examine, relate, and delve into my own life. I do not make paintings of people, but of quiet moments in people’s lives as they live them. I use the formal elements of painting to speak metaphorically about relationships and connection to the world around us.
Mother Earth never ceases to inspire. I often spend time painting from life the somehow both simple and majestic forms of nature, whether it is the Zinnias that I start from seed with my wife and daughters, or the Dandelions that pop up by chance, the red rock canyons a day trip away, or the snowy mountains out my front window.
Fitted to the quiet attitude of my work, my color palette is limited, muted and rooted in earth tones. Personal and cultural growth, change, and development most often happen quietly and over long periods of time, not in bright bursts of color. Life is not lived in saturation.
I follow an impulse to jot down words, phrases or stanzas that come to mind as I paint. Composing these into short-form poems has allowed me to develop an idea within a painting without overworking the panel. The relationship of word and image welcomes a third space between mediums that can feel more personal and universal than just word or picture alone.
Through my practice, I am not trying to find or define grand importance or meaning. I simply aim to capture moments of closeness, moments that echo, by reliving those split-second sacrednesses with paintbrush or pencil.”
CAS