As a contemporary still life painter, my compositions tend to involve bright colors and glass objects which reflect and distort light in interesting patterns. However, a visit to a home décor store found me the owner of some large wooden black and white dice and shiny black plastic dominos. I decided to develop a composition based solely on black and white. Scrounging through my still life stash of objects, I selected a martini glass used in multiple prior paintings and a variety of black and white game objects. I created a background using black and white ribbon and the inside of a shopping bag for the striped table surface. The result was “Playing with Black and White” with a play on words in the title.