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Before ink, there were pastels.

I loved them for their color, the raw, saturated pigment you could push and blend with your fingers. Pastels are sensorial in a way few mediums are, there is something almost primal about them. No brush between you and the surface, just pigment and skin. I studied with American masters at the Pastel Society of America in New York City, where I would eventually become an associate signature painter. It was there, in exhilarating workshops, that I first saw ink used not as a rival to pastel but as its foundation, an underlayer laid down before the color arrives, to give it even more depth and character. I did not think much of it at the time. It seemed like a technique among many others, a trick borrowed to make pastel behave differently.

Until that summer afternoon in New York.

It was a scorching day, the kind of Manhattan heat that melts on you and refuses to leave. I had a sheet of paper on the floor, ArtSpectrum Colourfix, a paper built for pastel but forgiving enough to hold liquids.  I had a bowl of water beside me, there might have been a few ice cubes floating in it, and without much thought, I threw a splash of it across the sheet. Then I took a pipette of ink and let it fall. The moment the ink hit the wet paper, thunder and lightning hit inside me. A flower fused into being, bloomed wild and free, the way ink does when it meets water on its own terms, spreading and pulling and finding shapes no hand could have planned.

It was love. Immediate, imperious, demanding, and it has not left me since.

What I could not have explained then, but understand now, is why that moment struck so hard. Pastel is a medium of control. You choose the pressure, the direction, the blend, and the pigment does more or less what you ask of it. Ink on wet paper does not ask permission. It moves according to its own logic, and the artist’s mission shifts from directing to responding. You place the water, making the paper lusciously shiny. You release the ink. And then you watch, and you decide, in real time, whether what is happening is something to interrupt or to let continue.

Pastel, I now think, suited - and maybe still does - a particular version of me: the version that plans, curates, manages perception for a living. Every day, my work asks me to control how people move through a space, what they notice first and what a given color subconsciously signals. I am good at this, and I have built a career on it. And pastel lets me bring that same instinct into the studio. Decide, adjust, refine, decide again.

Ink refuses that instinct entirely. It does not care what I intended. It asks me to release something and trust it before I know how it will land, which, for someone whose professional life is built on controlling outcomes, is not a natural state. It is closer to a discipline I am still learning than a talent I already possess. Letting go, for me, is not effortless. It is a wish before it is a practice, an objective before it is a skill, and on the good days, when the water and the pigment find something I could not have planned, it becomes, for a brief moment, an art in itself.

In hindsight, that distinction between making a mark and releasing one, turned out to be the real subject of my practice. But the truth is, my relationship with ink did not begin that afternoon. It only revealed itself in a very memorable way.

Long before pastels, before any formal training, there was a pen and a notebook. As a child, I filled pages compulsively. My parents could take me to restaurants or to visit their friends. As long as I had a stack a paper, I could blissfully keep myself occupied. Drawing and later writing, became as natural as breathing. One art used marks, the other used words, but both were pen to paper, both were ink finding its way across a white surface. That sultry afternoon in New York simply reminded me of something I had always known and had, for a while, forgotten in the busyness of corporate life: that ink, in whatever form it takes, has always been my first language. Today, that instinct lives in two places at once. It exists on paper, in ink and water, in paintings of landscapes at the edge of abstraction. And it lives in words, in the writing I do alongside the painting, quietly, consistently, the way I have since childhood, long before either practice had a name or an audience.

I paint with ink. I think with words.

I have said that sentence for a while now, mostly to myself, without always tracing it back to its origin. But it started long before that afternoon on the floor. It started with a child and a pen, and it simply took decades, and a particularly hot day in Manhattan, to remember what had been true the whole time. I am not sure pastel and I are finished with each other. I doubt any medium that shaped you for years fully lets go. And there is still color in me that wants blending, fingers on pigment and that older, warmer intimacy. But ink asks something different of me. It asks me to trust what I cannot entirely direct. Paper first. Life, I am still working on.