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As our yellow school bus creaked to a stop outside the Blanton Museum of Art, I knew only that a perfectly good field trip was being wasted on boring art instead of swimming at Barton Springs. It was a hot spring day in Austin, and I was a hyperactive, generally unkempt 8-year-old whose primary expertise was in LEGO and video games. I had never been to an art exhibition, but it didn’t sound promising.
My classmates and I walked into the cool, dim gallery. I blinked my eyes, and my mouth cracked open slightly. My undeveloped child brain couldn’t comprehend the unbridled technicolor chaos that practically melted from each giant canvas. I had never seen anything remotely like it.
Surprisingly, the paintings on the walls weren’t dull landscapes and portraits of dead people. There were wildly distorted neon-hued bodies mixed with bubbles of text, and every component oozed into the next. There was blood! And guts! This stuff was super weird. Art could look like this? It looked like Sunday morning cartoons run through a food processor. I was receiving a colorfully blunt introduction to contemporary art via surrealist pop painter Peter Saul. It was revelatory and life-changing. This was actually a good field trip, and I think I’m still on it.
I’m so glad you found Colossal. There have been countless moments in my life with art that have led to writing this letter to you. After accepting that I was not an Important Artist in college, my fascination with visual culture led to the creation of this website in 2010 where tens of millions of readers have visited to learn about contemporary art, photography, craft, design, illustration, film, and the beauty of the natural world.
We hope you enjoy what you discover here over the coming months and years. Every single day I want you to feel what I felt that first time I stepped into a museum: that raw, awe-inspiring shiver that only art can evoke.
Everything we publish on Colossal is free to all thanks to support from our members and limited sponsorship. There are currently just four of us (including Grace Ebert, Jackie Andres, and Kate Mothes) who talk to every artist, write every article, and compose every newsletter by hand. Art made by humans, curated by humans, for humans. Please consider supporting our work.
What was your first experience with art? Hit reply and let me know!
Best from Chicago,
Christopher Jobson
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