What is it about opposites that attract us? The light is lighter when viewed next to the dark. Yin and yang, id and superego...the theme recurs through millennia. "The Moving Finger Writes" is a study in opposites. It began as an intuitive abstract, awash in pale hues... pastel pinks with minty green and light teal. But, in this painting as in life, calm begets boredom. It cried out for the tension and power of strength, depicted through dark values, hard edges and jagged, twitchy marks. To highlight the juxtaposition, I selected those areas of the delicate background that I liked the best, masked them to protect them and provide additional layers of depth, and painted around the masked areas with neutral grays in varying levels of transparency. What followed was successive layers of masking, writing, marks, more masks and more marks until I was happy with the result. Asemic writing woven through the piece connects the strength with the calm and gives rise to the title, based on the immortal words of Omar Khayyam, ‚"The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on."