Artist Colby Sanford is sharing an intriguing new collection of approximately 20 works, to be displayed at Meyer Gallery in Park City, Utah. Sanford is most known for depicting his family as his subjects, but “his paintings seem to speak to our own distant memories,” says Meyer Gallery, “perhaps telling us something about ourselves.” While Sanford has indeed explored many significant conceptual themes in his career, his show with Meyer titled Patterns, expands even further.Your Song on My Tongue (triptych), acrylic on panel, 24 x 56"“My work is based around my own life as the jumping point,” Sanford explains, “but it gets a little more romantic in mind as I consider everything that happens. I dig deep into the meaning and [in respects to this show] I explore things like intergenerational patterns.”

For Patterns, Sanford’s thinking began with an exploration of our human routines or, rather, the things we do every day. “It’s the daily patterns of waking up and going to bed, eating food,” he says. “Simple rituals.”

This is can be more clearly seen in Done and Undone, in which, Sanford features his wife doing her hair with her back to the viewer. She’s wearing a knit sweater, that the artist has expertly “knitted” together with painting, further deepening his concepts. “This show will have a lot of knitted work,” Sanford says, “where I knit sweaters, or knitting texture. There’s something about repetitive and linear pattern in knitting, because that’s how life is. You move through it one thing at a time. There’s a constant force that turns into something beautiful over time.” This is also akin to our routines and rituals, or rather an echo, parallel or even headier, a pattern. Patchwork Sky, acrylic on panel, 38 x 24"

Diving even deeper, Sanford investigates intergenerational patterns in works like Your Song on My Tongue, a sentimental triptych depicting three generations of women; his mother in-law, with a robin bird facing her, along with two other panels of his wife and daughter, walking across the grass in a yard. “My mother in-law passed away on May 10 years ago,” Sanford explains, “and around the same time, there were a bunch of robins everywhere, since it was spring season. When we see a robin, we think of her; it’s a simple reminder of that time for my whole family.”

Sanford adds, “This painting is about three generations and how we pass on. The robin is turned around, as if coming back, looking at my mother in-law. Maybe we think it’s all a straight forward line—like in a pattern; I’m following right behind the past generation and future generations are right behind me, but I like to think that it’s not as linear in the future. We kind of turn back and all be together.”Done and Undone, acrylic on panel, 48 x 50"

Themes of youth also spring forward in works like Patchwork Sky, featuring two little girls playing beneath a quilt. The idea of youth in general sparks something for Sanford, and the “freedom that comes with youth and how you don’t realize what it means to be a kid until you pass through it,” he says. “It’s like an alternative reality.” 

While Sanford is well aware that not everyone experiences the same childhood, he uses this work to express his gratitude for his own childhood, and as a wish to his daughter and all children everywhere, that they also get to indulge in a brief moment of emancipation from adulthood.

Join Meyer Gallery in honoring “quiet nostalgia,” yet powerful works, from June 26 through July 23. Viewers will also get a special treat, as Sanford accompanies each piece with a poem—a collection of thoughts through his painting process. —

Meyer Gallery  
305 Main Street • Park City, UT 84060
(435) 649-8160 • www.meyergallery.com 

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