Vibrant Worlds With VSCO Montage
How Trinity Mobley’s evolving relationship with color influences his expression of identity.
“When I reflect on my life, I notice that my life has always been full of color — not so much on the outside, but on the inside,” says Trinity Mobley, a 20-year-old visual artist from Lancaster, South Carolina. “Every time I close my eyes, color has always been there, even in my darkest times.”
Trinity constructs imaginative worlds out of vibrant hues and patterns, exploring his innermost thoughts through experimental self-portraits. With VSCO Montage, VSCO’s new video storytelling feature, Trinity’s creative explorations take on new dimensions, as he uses colors and shapes to express the facets of his identity.
“I often have a hard time communicating and understanding my feelings, so I express myself through my art,” he shares.
This Is VSCO Montage: Combine Videos, Images, and Shapes
“I struggled a lot with my identity growing up because I had a hard time understanding who I was,” he goes on. “I was always trying to be someone else, someone who could be accepted.”
Trinity remembers suppressing sides of his personality in order to fit in with the societal norms of his small town.
“I wanted to be more flamboyant in my gender expression and open about my sexuality, but I never understood why it was so frowned upon,” he says.
The primary colors blue, yellow, and red have characterized different periods for Trinity in the course of discovering his identity.
“For most of my childhood, blue was my go-to color,” he says. “It was a desolate, sad, yet comforting color for me. I thought that if blue was my favorite color, it would make me appear more ‘masculine.’ ”
“In high school, yellow became my favorite color,” he continues. “That’s when I stepped outside of my comfort zone and started to embrace the brighter things in life.”
The color embodied truth, self-acceptance, and a sense connection for Trinity.
“I met my best friend, and with her, I found joy and happiness,” he recalls. “Yellow was my days. Yellow was my energy. Yellow was my happiness.”
Now, on the cusp of adulthood, Trinity relates to the duality of red. “Red can be bright, but it can also be very dark,” he says. “I feel like I am in a red limbo the majority of my days, because I am caught in between my dreams and reality.”
With goals of becoming either a creative director, photographer, or another occupation that satisfies his drive to express himself, Trinity sees his future possibilities tempered by the demands of his daily life.
“The growth that I face now is the growth most people call life and adulthood,” he explains. “This is the kind of growth in which no one helps you out. You have to make mistakes and own up to responsibilities.”
Trinity continues to explore the dimensions of his identity through color, turning his interior world into outward expressions of art. “I now use these colors to create anything that I can imagine,” he says. “I try to make something completely different from the last thing that I created.”
With geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic abstractions, Trinity challenges the limits of self-portraiture, but finds balance in form and convention.
“I can go a bit crazy when it comes to creating art, so patterns and symmetry allow me to have some sort of structure to my work,” he says.
Trinity’s process of experimentation is closely tied to his journey of self-acceptance.
“It took years for me to build up the courage to stop caring about what others thought about me or the way I express myself,” he says. “Many years of me trying to understand my identity and who I am — a pansexual black man whose creativity knows no gender, sexual, or social boundaries.
Create vibrant worlds of your own and share your story using VSCO Montage.
