Mike Cloud
My project explores how mystical attitudes toward color, held by ancient people, fit into modern paradigms of seeing and composing color. I intend to study aspects of color in classical Western Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticisms. That research will be instrumental in my creative exploration of visualizing the range of cardinal, sociohistorical forces around me. I will also retrace research from the 1980s by James Ackerman (1952 Fellow and four-time Resident) into Renaissance color theory, which has been important to my teaching and practice as an artist. This will culminate in a body of mixed-media collages using colored pencil, color paper, photography, and contemporary ephemera. These new works will chronicle my time in Rome and construct simple pictorial world histories based on my research. These histories foreground ancient and heraldic strategies of color-coded diagramming with the doctrine of God’s grace as my motive force in world building.