This creative season feels closely connected to the threads I continue to explore through Flow-Inspired Creations and in Uniquely You: belonging, self-expression, and the ways creativity helps us see differently. Returning to paint has become another way of following those threads.
About six weeks ago, I joined Art2Life because I felt a real pull to return to painting.
Until now, I had not really painted with acrylics. In the past, when I painted, I mostly used alcohol inks, acrylic inks, pens, and ink work of various kinds. So stepping into acrylic painting felt like entering a different kind of conversation altogether, one that asked me to slow down, observe more carefully, and get to know the behaviour of the paint itself.
One of the first things that struck me was the importance of value.
In painting, value refers to the lightness or darkness of a colour. Before moving into colour, we did an exercise working only in black, white, and all the greys in between. At first, that felt like a narrowing. But in another way, it was a revelation. Without the distraction of colour, I began to see more clearly how much a painting depends on contrast, where the eye is drawn, what comes forward, what recedes, and how light and dark create a kind of structure beneath everything else.
That was a real discovery for me.
Later, when we moved into colour, I found it fascinating to notice that value still comes first. Before we register the full complexity of a painting, we often respond to its lightness and darkness. Something in us notices contrast before it names colour. That changed the way I began to look, not only at paintings, but at photographs, landscapes, and everyday moments.
Last weekend, I was at a friend’s house, and they showed me photos from an overseas trip. As I looked at them, I found myself noticing the value contrasts almost immediately: the way light and shadow gave the images their beauty and depth. It was as though something had sharpened in my seeing. Before, I might simply have said, “That’s beautiful,” and left it there. Now I find myself asking what it is that I’m actually responding to. What is drawing me in? What creates that sense of harmony, movement, or feeling?
I’ve also discovered that I really enjoy working in black and white, and more recently with a limited palette, exploring what happens when I stay within a smaller range and pay closer attention to the play of light and dark within it. There is something unexpectedly freeing in that. Less to manage, perhaps, and more to notice.
I’m beginning to let some of these creative threads continue over on Substack, for those who’d like to follow me there too.
So this creative season is teaching me more than technique. It is teaching me how to see.
It is teaching me that what seems simple may contain far more depth than I first imagined. It is teaching me that limitation can become a doorway. And it is teaching me that when we pay closer attention, the world begins to reveal itself differently: in photographs, in nature, in paint, and perhaps in life more broadly too.
I’m sharing a few of these black-and-white explorations here, not as polished masterpieces, but as part of the process. They are strange and searching and experimental in their own way. But perhaps that is part of the point. There is something quietly brave in allowing explorations to be seen before they are resolved.
Sometimes the learning is the artwork too.
If you’d like to read a companion reflection to this post, I’ve shared one over on Substack: From the Margins of Ordinary Days.