The Van Gogh Necklaces: What Happens When The Drawer Is Opened.

It started with beads on the table and no real plan.

I’d pulled out greens — moss, sage, something closer to seaweed — just to see what they’d do next to each other. No project in mind. Just color, next to color, seeing what happened.

About the third necklace in, something felt familiar. Not the beads themselves — the relationship between them. The way the darker green sat next to the pale one, and how a single warmer bead kept the whole thing from going flat.

I’d seen that relationship before. In a painting.

Fall of 2023, at the Musée d’Orsay, I’d stopped in front of a Van Gogh and photographed it the way I photograph most things that stop me — not thinking I’d do anything with it. Just wanting to remember it.

I pulled the photo back up. Same greens. Same quiet warm note breaking up the cool ones.

So I reached for the pastels and a handful of colored pencils and tried to pull the palette straight off the painting — not copy the image, just the colors, in the order they seemed to want to be in.

Handmade beaded necklaces in red, yellow, blue, and green hanging on driftwood branch outdoors.

What I keep noticing is that a color relationship doesn’t stay in one medium. It moves. A palette that works in oil paint on a canvas in Paris also works in glass beads on a table in California. The materials change. The relationship between the colors doesn’t.

I don’t know yet where this palette goes next. Probably somewhere I’m not expecting.