Coming Apart, Coming Together how it all started. 

It started with texture.

Not a vision. Not a feeling I was chasing. Just a question: what happens when ink pools and dries inside the valleys of a heavily textured surface? What does it do? Where does it go? I wanted to find out.

That's how Coming Apart, Coming Together began — as an experiment, not a painting. No color story in mind, no emotional territory mapped out in advance. Just texture and curiosity and a willingness to see what happened next.

Then I made a decision that made me uncomfortable.

Blues. Teals. Purples.

I don't typically work in those colors. My instinct runs warmer — reds, ochres, golds, the earthy tones that feel like mine. Blues and purples sit outside my comfort zone in a way that's hard to explain. They feel like someone else's palette. Someone else's emotional vocabulary.

Which is exactly why I chose them.

I was deliberately trying to break out of a rut. To be unpredictable — not for the sake of it, but because I knew that predictable wasn't going to teach me anything new. Comfort zones in the studio are just walls with better lighting. I needed to trust myself enough to work in unfamiliar territory and see what came back.

Comfort zones in the studio are just walls with better lighting.

So I started laying in the blues and teals and purples. Fluid acrylics first, following the texture, pooling in the low places the way I'd hoped. And then the inks.

Here's the thing about working with fluid acrylics and inks: they are not interested in your plans.

You put them down going one direction. You step back. You give them ten minutes. You come back and they've gone somewhere else entirely — mixed with something they weren't supposed to touch, bled past a boundary you thought you'd established, dried in a way that looks nothing like it looked wet. Some days it's deeply annoying. You thought you had it and you didn't.

This was one of those days. Several times over.

But here's what I've learned from years of fighting it: the painting usually knows more than I do.

When I stopped trying to control where the ink went and started paying attention to where it wanted to go, something shifted. The dark churning mass at the bottom — the charcoal and deep teal — started doing something I hadn't planned for. It had movement. Real movement, the kind you can't manufacture. And the magentas and violets blooming above it weren't fighting the dark. They were rising out of it.

I stepped back and saw it for the first time.

Two forces in the same frame. Neither winning. Both necessary. The tension between them holding the whole thing together.

That's what transformation actually looks like — not graceful, not linear, not a clean before-and-after. It's the dark mass and the bloom existing simultaneously. It's coming apart and coming together at the same time, in the same painting, on the same afternoon.

I'm no longer the boss. I'm the student.

This is what I love most about working in fluid acrylics and inks. Not in spite of the unpredictability — because of it. The medium takes the ego out of the process. I can't white-knuckle my way to a result. I have to stay present, stay curious, and trust that if I keep paying attention something true will show up.

Some days it doesn't. Some days I cover everything and start again. But some days — the days when I stop fighting and start listening — the painting arrives at something I couldn't have planned my way to.

Coming Apart, Coming Together was one of those days.

It taught me something about color — that blues and teals and purples have their own emotional intelligence, and I'd been avoiding a whole vocabulary I didn't know I needed. It taught me about patience, and about the specific kind of trust that means letting go of the outcome. And it reminded me of something I have to keep learning: I'm not here to control the work. I'm here to follow it.

— Kim

Coming Apart, Coming Together is part of the Bloom Series -- you can find the full collection here