Ten Years Chasing a Blue I Could Never Paint

Every artist I know has one. Not a favorite color—an obsession. A specific shade that lives behind the eyes and refuses to come out. Mine is a blue. Not navy, not cobalt, not cerulean, not that Instagram-friendly dusty blue everyone was painting their kitchens two years ago. Something else. Something I've never once managed to get onto canvas the way it exists in my memory.

I've been chasing it for ten years. This is a confession, a color theory deep dive, and maybe—finally—an obituary.

The First Sighting

I was nineteen, driving back to Columbus from a camping trip in Hocking Hills, and the sky over the highway did something I still can't explain. It was late September, maybe 6:40 in the evening, and for about ninety seconds the light turned a blue I had no name for. Cool but not cold. Deep but not dark. It looked the way a lake sounds right before it freezes.

I pulled over at a gas station and sketched it in a Moleskine with a ballpoint pen, which—as any painter will tell you—is like trying to record a symphony by humming into your fist. But I wrote one word next to the scribble: that one.

That one has been haunting my studio ever since.

Why You Can't Mix Your Way There

Here's the color theory part, and it's genuinely comforting if you've been blaming your own hands.

Paint doesn't emit light. It reflects it. The blue I saw that evening was light—actual, atmospheric, self-luminous sky doing its thing at a precise angle through humid Ohio air. Pigment can only ever subtract from white light, never add to it. That's why the sky at dusk contains colors no tube of paint can hold. Every painter eventually runs into this wall. The Impressionists spent their whole careers bumping against it.

I didn't know that at nineteen. I thought I just needed the right brand, the right medium, the right ratio. So I bought more paint. A lot more paint.

The Decade of Failed Experiments

Over the next ten years, that unmixable blue worked its way into nearly everything I made. And I do mean worked its way—often without my permission.

• The abstract series I did in my mid-twenties: seven canvases, all of them an attempt to get closer. The gallery owner called them "moody." I called them evidence.
• A logo redesign for a friend's coffee shop where I spent an unprofessional amount of time nudging a hex code one tick at a time. (#2A4D6E, then #2B4F71, then back.) He picked the first one.
• A watercolor period where I layered washes like I was varnishing a boat, trying to build depth the way the sky did.
• A screen-printed poster run where the blue came out gorgeous—just not my blue. I sold every copy and felt weirdly hollow about it.

The strangest part? People loved those pieces. Clients bought them. One of the paintings is still the most-reproduced image on this site. The work succeeded even though, in my head, every single piece was a miss.

That took a long time to sit with.

What the Chase Was Actually For

Somewhere around year eight, I stopped asking "how do I mix this color?" and started asking "why does this color matter to me?"

And honestly? The answer wasn't really about color. That evening on Route 33 was one of the last times I remember being purely, uncomplicatedly amazed by something—before rent, before clients, before invoices and algorithms. The blue was a container for a feeling. Of course it wouldn't translate. Feelings don't have hex codes.

Once I understood that, the chase changed shape. I stopped trying to be accurate and started trying to be honest. Some of my recent work leans warmer now, or drops the blue entirely. And ironically, the paintings where I mention the blue—hint at it, gesture toward it—feel closer to that evening than any of the forensic attempts ever did.

Let the Color Get Away

If you've got a white whale of your own—a shade, a sound, a sentence structure you can never quite nail—I want to give you permission I had to give myself: the gap between the vision and the work is not a flaw in your practice. It's the engine of it.

Perfection on canvas would mean the conversation is over. The unmixable blue keeps me at the easel. It's the reason I'm still curious after a decade. In a weird way, I hope I never catch it.

I still keep that Moleskine in a drawer in the studio, ballpoint sketch and all. Every so often I flip to the page, look at the scribble, and read the two words I wrote at that gas station.

That one.

Still true. Still out there. Good.