Will Haslun

By training, I'm a corporate attorney — credit facilities, secured transactions, the architecture of complex deals. I spent years at firms like Skadden and Kirkland building documents that had to be precise and internally consistent.

Watercolor is a different discipline but a similar puzzle: you're still constructing complex layers that have to hold together logically, but the medium pushes back in ways a defined term never does. And where corporate law rewards perfection, watercolor rewards happy mistakes.

At Hamilton College, I took advantage of the open curriculum to study figure drawing and oil painting alongside my regular coursework. I never took watercolor formally, but I owe my foundational training to the art department faculty there.

That creative practice quieted during law school and the early years of my career — and it wasn't until my thirties that I found my way back to it. Watercolor turned out to be the right fit: I can start and finish a piece in one sitting, my hyperfocus kicks in, everything aligns into a flow state, and three hours later there's a painting.

Law trained me how to wrangle ambiguity into precise meaning. But watercolor has taught me how we can make meaning out of precise ambiguity.

(Also, the history of pigments, and the science of how our eyes perceive layered wavelengths of color, fascinates the scientist in me—hence the Color Lab.)