Welcome to the final installment of Unnameable Colors 2026, my fine art calendar and the three-part low-stakes email saga! The calendars are now out in the world, and I am very touched by all the kind responses and texts. I believe my East coast recipients should be receiving theirs any day now.
In part one I talked about the paintings themselves. Part two was about scanning. And part 3 is a bit of a left turn now that most of the calendars I sent out have arrived: production (funnest!) and shame (woops here we go!)
Getting mail is just fun. Working with a printer is fun too. Sending the proofs, approving the production, putting something real into someone else’s hands they can hold and write on and stare at is such a salve on an achy brain, mostly for the sender. And yet, the suffering in the world seems to be escalating, or at least we’re more aware of it than we used to be. Forests are burning. Children in Gaza are still starving. I think it’s natural doing a project like this that is just about spreading joy of surface level beauty, beauty that’s not even universal but beauty based on my taste alone, might make me feel something pretty complicated.
I don’t think shame around this is necessarily a bad thing. Shame can check a person and point you to evaluate priorities/actions to take. If shame isn’t a dominating ruler, but rather one member of a mental court of advisors, it’s maybe not a bad point of input to have. So that’s why I wrote some letters on this project – before I completed it and as I am sending it out. I wanted to answer for myself, why I am I making something, and why am I telling people about it?
I think in previous years, I just wanted to make something cool and maybe break even on giving out 75 calendars with 28 full color pages printed on beautiful paper. I want to believe that making something cool and putting some art out there because I love it can encourage other people to do the same. I think caring is a muscle, and if you exercise it, it might grow. I also wonder if the more you exercise caring about something outside of your head, maybe it can influence a person to care about issues that are more and more global, and strengthen your empathy muscles as well.
So that’s the reason I did this project with sort of a public documentation angle this year. I wanted to practice caring in public, and I hope it encourages you to do the same – about your own art and also maybe something else that’s important to you too.
This year I went with a glossy 100# half post-consumer recycled paper. Gloss adds to perceived saturation, and I think it’s been a good choice for an art calendar, even though be fair warned you’ll need to let ink dry if you write on it to avoid smudging. But at the end of the day, I went with form over function on this one.
The rest of my stash is now on sale, if you’d like to grab an extra copy. I’m really proud of keeping the cost on these as low as possible, both for the originals and the prints. Affordable gifts that aren’t from a big company are fun (for me anyway) to discover and I think it’s so cool to be able to hang originals in your own home gallery.
Thank you again for following along, and I hope you are making something fun too. Please tell me about it when you do.
