Painting Toward the Light

Cover photo by Dua Chuot, 2018

Light is more than illumination 

Painters do not simply paint things. We paint the way light interacts with a subject, the way it saturates color, reveals form, and dissolves into darkness. Light from the front accentuates a surface. Light from behind can reveal an inner structure. Through this balancing act of revealing and obscuring, we can imbue emotion into even the most ordinary of objects.

I recently brought some flowers into my garden to prepare reference images and found myself completely absorbed by the light moving across them. Direct sunlight described the delicate texture of a rose, while reflected light passed through its petals, revealing an unexpected transparency. Warmth collected in some areas while cooler notes appeared in others. Edges seemed to glow, disappear, then reappear.

The delicacy and complexity of it nearly moved me to tears.

It is extraordinary to consider that our world is filled with such intricate systems and living forms, of which we perceive only a minuscule fraction. Painting, for me, has increasingly become a way of staying with that realization a little longer. A way of looking closely enough that something familiar becomes mysterious again.

The light I once looked for 

In what now feels like a former life, I worked in a deep chiaroscuro style. I prioritized the contrast between dark shadows and areas of pronounced light, allowing forms to emerge dramatically from the darkness. The effect could be theatrical and emotionally intense. It aligned with where I was at the time, and I still revere it as a sincere and important way of seeing.

An art historian by training, I have always been fascinated by the techniques of the Old Masters. I wanted to experience their approaches firsthand, not simply study them from a distance. My process became highly academic and intellectual, rooted in careful observation, value structure, and a desire to understand how light could construct form.

My inner life at the time was steeped in drama, too.

Looking back, there seems to have been an affinity between the two. The light in those paintings was concentrated and theatrical. It revealed the subject by separating it from darkness.

Robyn Palescandolo, Onions in Red, 2019

When seeing changes 

Several years later, after illness and profound changes in my life, I returned to the United States. I settled in a place that felt more familiar to me, yet I was in many ways encountering it for the first time. 

My return home coincided with a much longer return to health. The forced slowness of illness, treatment, and recovery altered my relationship with attention, time, and ordinary existence. I became unusually sensitive to small pleasures, softness, and color. Simply being present could feel profound.

Perhaps recognizing the fragility of my own existence permanently altered the way I responded to the fragility of other living things.

As I slowly came back to life, I began noticing things my ever-observant eye had somehow overlooked before: light passing through petals, warm and cool colors existing alongside one another, seemingly blank spaces filled with subtle shifts of hue. The dramatic division between dark and light that had once fascinated me began to feel less complete.

My earlier paintings found light through contrast. California seemed to reveal it through diffusion.

From dark ground to colored atmosphere 

That shift gradually entered the paintings. Dark backgrounds had once isolated and intensified my subjects. They created a stage on which the light could appear dramatically. Over time, those backgrounds began filling with color. Lavender. Plum. Peach. Rose. Warm neutrals and cool violets that were difficult to name. The space surrounding the subject became less like a void and more like an atmosphere.

Color from the background began to enter the flowers. Reflected light moved across petals. Edges softened or disappeared altogether, only to return in another place. Instead of standing apart from its surroundings, the subject began to feel suspended within them.

I became increasingly interested in that ambiguity, in the places where a flower stops being a clearly defined object and becomes a collection of color, light, and brushstrokes. The backgrounds were no longer simply something behind the painting. They had become part of what the painting was saying. 

Robyn Palescandolo, Bouquet of Peonies, detail, 2026

 

Learning to see color before value 

The change eventually reached the foundation of my process. For years, I had approached painting through value. Like many painters working within a classical tradition, I began by establishing a tonal structure first, mapping the composition through relationships of light and dark before introducing fuller color. It is an incredibly useful way to understand form, and value still matters deeply in my work. But I began to wonder what would happen if I stopped asking it to lead.

Instead of first reducing a flower to a pattern of lights and darks, I started looking for relationships of color. A cool violet beside a warm peach. A red reflected into the underside of a leaf. A pale pink shifting toward yellow as it approached the light. One color began to suggest the next. Gradually, I stopped using a value-based underpainting altogether. 

This felt strangely vulnerable at first. I had removed the map I had relied upon for years. But it also felt freeing. Rather than constructing the painting according to a predetermined tonal system, I could allow it to emerge more directly through observation.

I had not stopped seeing value. I had stopped asking it to make every decision first. The distinction has changed the way I paint, but perhaps more importantly, it has changed the way I look. Does a painter see color contained within value, or value contained within color? I am not sure there is a definitive answer. Increasingly, I am less interested in finding one.

Wipeout underpainting mapping tones, 2021

Underpainting mapping color, 2026

Softness as a form of attention 

My paintings have become softer as my relationship with painting has softened. For a long time, I associated clarity with resolution. If an edge could be defined, I defined it. If a form could be modeled further, I continued modeling it. 

Now I am often trying to do less. 

Softness is not the absence of observation. In many ways it asks for more of it. To leave an edge unresolved, I first have to understand what is happening there. I have to see the subtle transition rather than automatically turning it into a line.

Painting this way requires me to slow down and remain receptive. There is a rhythm that settles over the studio: looking, mixing, placing a mark, stepping away. Looking again. Sometimes doing nothing. This is where painting becomes meditation for me. Not because the studio is always peaceful. It isn't. Paintings can be frustrating and uncertain, and I still have an astonishing capacity to overwork them. But sustained observation pulls me toward the present.

For a few hours, the world narrows to the temperature of a shadow, the edge of a petal, the precise color that exists between two others. There is something deeply restorative in that kind of attention. Perhaps healing has influenced my painting less by giving me a new subject than by changing the quality of attention I bring to one. 

Robyn Palescandolo, 'White Rose in a Lavender Haze' in the Studio, 2026

 

Painting toward the light 

I sometimes describe this evolution as painting toward the light. I do not mean that I want to make paintings that are simply bright or cheerful, or that darkness no longer interests me. Shadow remains essential. Contrast remains essential. Without darkness, there is no way to fully understand light. But I no longer experience the two as such complete opposites.

The flowers I paint have helped me understand this. Light does not merely fall across them. It enters them. It passes through petals, reflects from one surface into another, mixes with their color, and disappears into shadow. Darkness can contain violet or green or rose. A white petal can hold an entire spectrum. The boundaries are far less fixed than they first appear.

Perhaps that is what has changed most in my work, and in me. I am less interested in separating light from darkness, object from atmosphere, finished from unfinished, control from uncertainty. I am more interested in the places where they meet. Painting toward the light has not meant leaving darkness behind. It has meant becoming more willing to notice what passes through it.