A Study in Black & White
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A Study in Black & White (2023) is a quiet reckoning with contrast — not just between color values, but between presence and absence, exposure and concealment. Part of my Hand-painted Photography Collection, this 60 x 60 inch mixed media painting offers a meditative inquiry into the image as trace, gesture, and transformation.
Built on a photographic base, the work merges hand-painted marks with grainy textures, creating a layered atmosphere where forms dissolve into shadow and light. The palette is limited, but emotionally rich: charcoal, ivory, slate, and ghosted gradients that blur boundaries.
This piece is not about starkness. It’s about subtle shifts. The black isn’t absolute. The white is rarely pure. Between them is a world of nuance — of hesitation, resistance, reflection. It’s less a study in contrast, more a study in coexistence.
There are echoes here of Francesca Woodman, whose black-and-white photographic self-portraits haunt the edges of visibility. Like Woodman, I am interested in what disappears — and what it leaves behind.
A Study in Black & White is about memory, perception, and presence. It asks what happens when you strip away color: what remains, what sharpens, what fades? It’s not cold. It’s contemplative. A space to feel without the distractions of saturation.
As part of the Hand-painted Photography Collection, this piece continues my exploration of the image as both archive and invention — a fragment of something seen, and something imagined.
