The Dusk Between Chaos and Calm
How light, dark, and color in art weave a language of emotion, memory, and healing
Intro
There is a time of day I’ve always loved. The moment when light softens, when summer evenings shorten, when the world seems to sigh. Dusk feels like a cool, comforting blanket, a quiet permission slip. It tells me, you can rest now.
That time of day is more than atmosphere — the changing light itself is a language. It breathes life into my art, filling it with both vitality and deep comfort. It is how my paintings come to life, in a felt story of experience.
Darkness as Rest and Grounding
People often fear darkness, equating it with sorrow, danger, or loss. But to me, darkness has always been where I find rest. The deep blues and shadowed tones in my art aren’t threats — they’re safety. They are the embrace that says, you don’t have to shine all the time.
The interplay of light and dark is essential — like yin and yang, sweet and sour, the balance of contrasts that can’t exist without one another. It mirrors the balance of life itself, of good and bad, joy and sorrow. In my art, that interplay becomes a way of lifting myself out of trauma by reaching for the light, even as I find comfort in the dark.
Light, Dark, and Fluorescence as Immersion
Light breathes life into my art, protected by the twilight of the setting sun and the blanketing darkness of dusk. That’s why I’m drawn to fluorescence, to colors that spark with their own electricity, and to deep tones like indigo and purple that cool and balance their brilliance. Together, they carry a life of their own, evoking not just vision but sensation — a world you can feel.
They invite immersion into a sanctuary where light and dark hold each other — a safe place, a dangerous place, an exhilarating place, and always a welcoming place to come home. In many ways, this is my language, my home — the place I return to again and again.
Bright Colors as Passion and Expression
Then come the bursts — hot pinks, corals, golds, colors that vibrate and almost hum on the surface. They are passion, romance, vitality. They are joy, rage, humor, rebellion, and the sensual pulse of being alive.
These colors aren’t just chaotic energy. They’re the soul insisting on its right to be expressed. They’re laughter, desire, curiosity, even mischief. They remind me — and maybe remind others — that life is not only grief or grounding, but also sweetness, exhilaration, and play.
Art as Language Without Words
In those moments, I am captured — engrossed, as if I’ve slipped into another world. It is my intuitive, nonlinear voice speaking, drawing me deeply into the very marrow of the work.
Painting becomes a way of navigating and reshaping the world I carry inside. Trauma, memories, and emotions flow through, as do joy, passion, and love — pieces of the self that often lie trapped, even dormant, longing for expression. They are redefined, realigned, released into a safe haven, an expressive language where I can breathe, exhale, excel, and expand.
This is a language stronger than words. A language of color. A story painted rather than told, a visual story of life and experience, expressing what words cannot hold.
The Struggle for Balance
Painting is never just about applying color. It is a negotiation — between light and shadow, chaos and calm, freedom and structure. The canvas becomes a mirror of my inner life: the longing for freedom held in tension with the need for grounding, the drive to expand balanced against the safety of boundaries.
Maybe that’s why finishing a piece can be so hard. It isn’t only about the art. It’s about waiting for that elusive moment when the painting itself finds equilibrium, when chaos and calm finally meet in the middle.
Dusk as a Universal Language
Dusk gives me permission to stop and notice the color of light and its interplay with dark. It is perhaps the most beautiful time of day besides sunrise — a settling of things, a quiet harmony, a reminder that beauty can exist in the in-between.
When someone stands before my work and feels a flicker of recognition — calm, longing, joy, sorrow, humor — it isn’t just my story they’re seeing. It’s theirs, too. Art becomes the bridge, dusk made visible, chaos and calm living side by side.
Closing Thought
I live, like many of us, in the in-between. Not just in shadow or light, not just in grief or joy. My art doesn’t try to resolve the tension. It lets both exist, layered and alive.
Just like dusk — that gentle, fleeting, necessary time when the world exhales.
Splinter & Bloom — a continuing story of art, memory, and meaning