FIELD NOTES

Thinking About Contrast

’ve been thinking about contrast.

Not as something to resolve, but something to live inside.

Listening to John O'Donohue, I‘ve been struck by the idea that opposites aren’t meant to cancel each other out. When they’re allowed to coexist, something else can emerge—a third presence.

That feels very close to how I work.

There is the work that moves inward—quiet, restrained, almost disappearing into the surface and light.

And there is the work that moves outward—color, gesture, immediacy.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told I need to choose between the two.

To focus.
To be clearer.
To stop “confusing” people.

But that has never felt right.

Because I don’t experience these as competing directions.
I experience them as a rhythm.

I breathe in, and I breathe out.
If I did only one, I’d die.

It’s the same in the studio.

One way of working gathers, listens, reduces.
The other releases, responds, comes into contact with the world.

They are not separate.
They depend on each other.

If I interrupt one, the other loses its vitality.

What may look like contradiction from the outside is, from within, something closer to balance.
Or movement.
Or simply being alive to more than one way of seeing.

Even in myself, I recognize it—I can be an introverted extrovert, or an extroverted introvert.

So the question is no longer which is the “real” work.

The work is shaped in the space between.