Blog / 2025 / Coloring Outside the Lines

I made coloring page versions of all nineteen paintings from Everything’s Fine because the point of the project is that we all struggle with our emotions and how to communicate with each other. It was important to me that people really be able to make these mental health artworks their own.

And they have! The daffodil monster coloring page shown above is by a patron of my local library, where the collection of Everything’s Fine paintings is currently on display along with coloring pages by anyone who wants to contribute to the show. I left a wall of the gallery open so that viewers of the exhibition could become participants.

If you want to add your own page to the wall and you like to color in company, join me at the library tomorrow evening for a reception, art talk, and coloring social!

Lambertville Free Public Library
6 Lilly Street
Lambertville, NJ 08530

Open: now through November 26^th
Reception and coloring social: Wednesday October 22^nd from 7p to 8:30p

You are, of course, not required to color, but there will be pencils and markers available for those who want to get into a creative space. I, for one, won’t be coloring at the event: I’ve been doing way too much of it recently.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been preparing mock-ups for a public art project in Philadelphia that’s part of a yearlong event called 52 Weeks of Firsts. For the art part of the event, twenty or so creatives will be painting sculptures shaped like the number one, depicting the many different ways Philadelphia has been first in the nation. I’ve been assigned the First Continental Congress, the first steamboat for passengers and freight, and the first zoo.

Right now, we’re in the design phase of the process, trying to convey to the project’s partners—Mural Arts, the National Constitution Center, and Historic Philadelphia—how we intend to represent each Philadelphian first.

Fitting together imagery on the various surfaces of the sculptures has been like any good puzzle: both frustrating and fascinating. But it was adding color to my drawings that turned out to be the real challenge. The flexibility of paint-mixing makes sense for my brain, and I struggle whenever I have to think in predetermined hues, like with colored pencils.

Making art about the First Continental Congress feels especially important at this moment, when the opposite is happening. What I mean is that, in 1774, our elected leaders came together to check the power of a king, and, in 2025, too many of them are doing everything they can to reverse course. GOPers are handing over all our rights one by one to an unwell man who believes everyone should follow his every hate-filled whim.

Which brings me back to the event at my local library tomorrow. I won’t be coloring in images on paper, but I will be coloring in three dimensions, as it were. The show as a whole is my way of holding back the cruelty and conformism of right wing thinking and making space for beauty, strangeness, kindness, and community.