The studio was quiet when I unlocked it this morning. A pale grey light rested across the table, softening the corners of everything. The surface I worked on yesterday had dried lighter than I expected. The colour I thought was settled had moved overnight, as though it had reconsidered itself in the dark.
This is something I return to often in my work. The sense that every instance of making contains both a beginning and an ending. A small birth. A small death.
When I place the first mark on a blank ground, something opens, and something closes at the same time. The openness of possibility narrows. What appeared infinite becomes defined. And with each layer added, other versions quietly fall away. I have painted out passages I once loved. I have washed back whole sections that seemed vibrant only hours before. The work changes its mind.
Or perhaps I change mine.
There is grief in that. Not dramatic grief, but the tender kind that comes with relinquishing what we imagined.
For years, one of my favourite poems has been T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. I carry parts of it by heart. The lines that often come to me in the studio are:
“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.”
There is something deeply truthful in that shadow. It is the space where intention does not fully become what we hoped. Where vision falters against the material. Where the imagined work meets resistance in the real one.
In the poem, the shadow brings desolation and spiritual dryness, with voices described as “quiet and meaningless.” But in my practice, that shadow feels more tender than bleak.
Every painting moves through that territory. A mark that seemed certain dries into uncertainty. A colour that appeared luminous turns muted in the daylight. I stand before the surface and feel a tightening, recognising that something must be let go. The letting go is rarely dramatic. It is a soft erasure, a quiet decision not to pursue.
Yet nothing is entirely lost. Under the surface, earlier gestures remain. The painting keeps its history of revisions. Scraped-back layers influence what follows. The body remembers brush movements, even when the eye sees no trace.
Some days, I leave the studio aware of how many quiet erasures have taken place. Other days, I sense the faintest stirring of something new, fragile and unannounced. Creativity, for me, is not a single act of invention but a continual movement through these small cycles of emergence and release.
The grey light shifts in my studio as the day goes on. What seemed diminished in the morning finds depth by afternoon. The shadow remains, but it is not empty. It is the place where the work changes, where it sheds one form and gathers another.
Perhaps that is why I return to Eliot’s lines with affection, not despair. The shadow is not simply failure. It is the space where transformation occurs, where the idea gives up certainty and becomes something lived, altered, and truer than I imagined.