Black, white and everything in between

You may think the process of creating art is totally intuitive. It may be, for some. Most of the time, it is not. Artists learn to use tools that help them create and interpret what they draw or paint. One tool is called a notan, which is a Japanese word that translates to “…light and dark, harmony and balance.” If an artist gets the lights and darks or “values” correct, then the work translates successfully to paper or canvas. A well-known saying among artists is, “Values do the work; color tells the story.”

Artists of the past relied on their skills to translate a scene from life to a notan. Now, we have apps that can do it. For instance, here is a sunset photo I took of our marina and a notan of it. For artists who paint plein air, they do draw a rough sketch by hand to guide them.

Once an artist identifies the darkest darks and lightest lights, they add complexity by using a grayscale. This is a scale of the amount of darkness in various places. Here is one example of a grayscale. An artist will try to show some levels of value, not all the levels on the scale. The grayscale is made up of black, white and everything in between. 

(Here comes my segue to where I am going with this, in case you were wondering.)

Our lives are not drawn in notans. They are more like a grey scale, the whole thing.

Some want certainty in black and white as a source of comfort. Others find it confining. Still others relish the challenge of charting a path through change.

As we each navigate our particular grayscale, I find wisdom in the words of Rev. Cameron Trimble in her blog, “Piloting Faith.” (She is a minister and a pilot.) I have shared her thoughts here before and I will do so again. As we say in the practice of ministry, “That’ll preach.”

“Jesus tells us not to store up treasures on Earth, not because wealth is bad, but because having resources is not the same as security.

• Money can buy a home, but it cannot create sanctuary.
• Money can purchase comfort, but it cannot produce peace.
• Money can fund treatment, but it cannot prevent mortality.
• Money can create options, but it cannot tell us who we are.
• Money can reduce some risks, but it cannot remove uncertainty from life.”

(What Money Cannot Buy, published June 2, 2026.)

I think we feel our grayscale keenly these days because so many things around us are changing and evolving. If things were black and white, if the path ahead were clear, we would feel more confident. We are grieving all this change on many levels.

In Rev.Trimble’s blog post of May 29, she said that some people want to find certainty by bringing the past back just as it was. We see this in attempts to overturn gains made since World War II for people of various races, backgrounds, religious traditions, and economic status.

Rev. Trimble points to the wisdom of various spiritual traditions that teach that people can face uncertainty and still find the sacred in surprising ways. Think of the Hebrew people wandering in the wilderness or the nation of Israel in exile in Babylon. The Buddhist tradition teaches that impermanence is at the heart of life.

She wrote, “…the sacred is more resilient than the structures carrying it. Spiritual maturity is learning to tell the difference between the fire and the container that carries it.”

Paying tribute to June as PRIDE month, I conclude with a poem by David Gate, which takes us to a colorful future beyond black and white, to everything in between.

“If God created night and day
and dawn, of course
and dusk
and the tangerine rose pink of sunset
and the deep amethyst twilight
and the infant bright of morning,
then to perceive the world in binary
is to forego knowledge of the divine.”