Color Visions
A place is never only one thing.
It exists as memory and presence, as past and possibility, as lived experience and imagined return. We revisit the same places throughout our lives, yet each encounter is shaped by mood, light, time, and the emotional state we bring with us. In this sense, a place holds many truths at once.
Color Visions is Robert Mihaly’s way of exploring these parallel realities.
Rather than treating color as a fixed attribute, Mihaly uses it as a language — a means of revisiting the same place through different emotional and perceptual states. Each Color Vision is not an alternative version of a painting, but a distinct way of inhabiting it. The architecture remains. The landscape holds steady. What changes is the atmosphere, the memory, and the feeling carried into the moment.
Mihaly’s approach reflects an understanding of place as something that exists across multiple times and emotional states simultaneously — a kind of block universe in which lived experiences, memories, and imagined futures occupy the same space. A place recalled at dusk may feel entirely different from the same place remembered in early morning light. One vision carries warmth and intimacy; another, distance or introspection. None replaces the others. All are equally true.
In creating multiple Color Visions of a single subject, Mihaly is not searching for a definitive or “correct” color. Instead, color becomes a means of resonance — a way to explore how memory softens edges, how emotion alters perception, and how atmosphere reshapes experience.
This practice has deep roots in art history. Painters have long returned to the same subject again and again, not to repeat it, but to understand it more fully. Each return reveals something new, not only about the place itself, but about the act of seeing. Mihaly’s Color Visions continue this tradition, grounded in the landscapes, buildings, and spaces of North Carolina that have shaped his life and work.
For collectors, Color Visions invite a personal form of engagement. Rather than selecting a work based on accuracy or realism, the choice becomes emotional and intuitive. Which version reflects one’s own memory of that place? Which atmosphere feels closest to lived experience, or to the emotional tone one wishes to live with?
Color Visions are not variations for variety’s sake. They are reflections of how memory, time, and emotion coexist — layered, simultaneous, and inseparable. Through them, a single place opens into many lived moments, each held in color.