Coloring Outside the Lines & Spiral

“Drawing from my senior-year AP Art portfolio, I selected Coloring Outside the Lines from the many pieces collecting dust in my basement. This work revisits my earlier sustained investigation: what does it mean to grow up? Rooted in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, it reflects our earliest impulse as children to create and express freely. On theme with Out with the New… in with the Old, it suggests that older works serve as capsules of our past selves—reminding us that artistic growth comes not from erasing who we were, but from embracing the evolution of our creative identities as we age with our art.

Building on these ideas, I created Spiral—a repurposed work composed of past students’ stretcher bars and an “unfinished” painting featuring the same spiral motif. Pulling from my first-year allegory painting, Spiraling Out of Control, I layered imagery from that piece onto the “unfinished painting.” Through these interwoven layers of reuse and transformation, Spiral embodies the evolution of our past selves, showing how traces of former creations continue to shape and sustain our present artistic identities.”