About Colors of Solitude

The Colors of Solitude is a body of work by artist and writer Amanda Aileen Fisher; it an exploration of a language that resides beyond The Word — one of color, received by the sensory self and coded in the subconscious. The work exposes Amanda’s own writing and discoveries and also invites you to enter into your own.

For 1 month, the artist wrote in a self-made color journal — 30 loose-leaf pages with a band of color hand-painted across the top, all of which she wrapped in a piece of raw painter’s canvas. Each day, she pulled the next sheet and wrote as usual, simply savoring the sensations of the sensory experience, the journal more tactile and dynamic than a typically-formatted bound one. However, after a few days, she began to realize that there was something in the writing related to the color, as if her writing, itself, was exposing what the color meant for her. So she began to read back each day and pull a word, phrase, or line of writing that resonated and use it to name that day’s color. At the end of the month, she realized this process had revealed to her the nature of her inner landscape and its particular tonalites. It was a decoding of her subconscious world of color, which she pulled forth from her writing.

In the second part of the project, Amanda extracted each color and name she had uncovered and painted them across one strip of fabric (image 1, below). She realized that this read as her internal color map, enabling her to see all the names, together, as one body, and to start noticing relations. Each natural color grouping read as its own message, like a more poetic color swatch from the paint store, showing her what a particular part of the color spectrum meant for her. She was fascinated by this. She began making more intentional arrangements of the names to create new meaning, leading her to discover new palettes — her palette of intimacy, for example, or her palette around illusion and internal questioning. It was all a discovery. And, to her, it all read like messages coming from her interior.

Finally, she arranged each of the names into one story, titled My becoming, with each of the columns of color representing different chapters in the journey into the self and back out again — a journey beginning with illusion (Mirage) and the need to break it (Moment of contact), and ending with a new understanding (A different kind of awakening) — a knowing that everything that sought was already inside the self (The pair hidden in its shadow). And in the final chapter, the self, now made whole through integration, walks away with the lesson: When we name it… You are all this.

Feeling the transformative impact of her own exploration into color, the artist now invites you to go on this journey, yourself — to unveil your own Colors of Solitude in a journal just like her own (available below). Also below are more extractions from the artist’s own work — some of her shorter color poems, excepts of her writing on her own handmade paper, as well as the entire collection of writing, which you can subscribe to receive on Substack.

This body of work also continues, with new forms and experiences to be revealed soon.

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