Title: Bridging the Gap: Reimagining My Old Work with a Bold New Voice

It’s a strange, almost disorienting feeling to look back at work from art school—especially when your artistic voice has grown louder, brighter, and more defiant over the past few months.

Lately, I’ve been diving back into my old paper-based pieces from the portfolio section of my time at art school. At the time, those works felt complete. They lived within softer color palettes and leaned heavily on rigid compositions—pieces that mirrored a more restrained version of me. But now, after a year of pushing my work into bolder, more vibrant, transitional territory, I find myself questioning how to breathe new life into them—without flattening the soul they already have.

My current style is defined by saturated colors, fearless layering, and organic forms that move more like music than geometry. I crave movement and energy in my work now. So revisiting these older pieces—ones built with delicate washes and tentative lines—feels like trying to speak in a voice I’ve since outgrown. It’s like painting in grayscale after learning how to sing in technicolor.

But here’s the real challenge: How do I honor who I was then while giving space to who I am now? How do I weave in dynamic shapes and unapologetic pigments without swallowing the intent of the original? I don’t want to erase the story behind the work—I want to evolve it.

It’s a balancing act. Adding boldness without making it chaotic. Injecting organic forms without making them feel forced. Breathing color into bland palettes without losing the emotional tone that lived in their quietness.

Some pieces resist transformation more than others. They fight against every brushstroke, refusing to bend to the new rhythm. But in a way, that tension is part of the process too. It reflects the transitional energy that now defines my work—not quite what it was, not quite what it will be. Just in motion.

So I’m not aiming to “fix” the old work. I’m learning to collaborate with it. To let my current self speak to my past self through paper, pigment, and process.

And maybe, in that dialogue, something entirely new will emerge.

Theresa Zingg