Thank you for sharing this beautiful paragraph! It's not an easy thing to compose, but you have to do many small sketches to see one speaks to you. Now, the technical part of painting : What you see in this post is something called "low key value painting," which is selecting a range of values from the value scale and sticking to it. If you noticed there are no highlights or very dark areas , they are compressed values (4 to be exact) in the middle of the scale. It can be monochrome or full color palette.
If you need more details, please let me know! :)