Why I stepped away from realism for a season and into the world of primary color — and what the Fauve painters taught me about emotional truth.
There's a moment in every painter's life when the rules start to feel like a cage. For me, that moment came standing in front of a vineyard at golden hour, watching the light turn the hillside into something almost violent in its beauty — deep purples crashing into acid greens, the sky going orange and pink in ways no careful, observational painter would dare put on canvas. And I thought: what if I just said yes to all of it?
That question led me to Fauvism — the early 20th century movement whose name literally means "wild beasts," coined by a critic who meant it as an insult. Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck — these painters looked at the world and decided that color could carry emotional weight independent of realistic representation. A face could be green. A shadow could be red. The point wasn't accuracy. The point was feeling.
My Fauve series began as an experiment and became something I couldn't stop. Fauve Fitch Mountain was the first — that hillside I'd painted a dozen times in careful, observed color, suddenly freed into pure sensation. I used color straight from the tube. I let shapes flatten and simplify. I stopped asking "is this accurate?" and started asking "is this alive?"
What surprised me most was how much harder it is than realism. When you remove the anchor of observed color, you have to make every decision yourself. There's no hiding behind what's in front of you. Every mark is a choice, and every choice reveals something about how you actually see and feel the world. It's terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
If you've ever stood somewhere so beautiful it almost hurt — a vineyard at dusk, a coastline at dawn — you already understand what Fauvism is reaching for. It's the attempt to paint not what you see, but what it feels like to be there.