15.0 The Effects of Light & Shadow

     It amazes me how changing light during the day can have a profound effect on the art in our house.  We shy away from bright lights and most frequently use table and floor lamps to light our living room.  What is created is a blending of differing light gradations running into shadow and darkness.  This sometimes disturbs Leigh, as she would prefer to see more clearly, but even she can agree that the quality of our lighting brings a soft and warm feel to the room—warm and cozy.  In terms of the art, certain aspects of the paintings are either enhanced by the dimness or are altogether obscured in shadow.  I love to see the flash of copper as the light hits a painting just perfectly.  The color comes and goes as I walk about the room, sometimes seeing that flash only out of the corner of my eye.  It’s there for a second, and then it’s gone.  It’s as though the painting has a life of its own, off in some other world, and only speaks to me when our worlds briefly overlap due to a change in the light.  For this reason my key color is copper.  It changes as the light changes throughout the day, from flat orange-brown to brilliant light reflected from the copper.  I believe that my paintings are best seen in differing amounts and angles of both natural and artificial light and not under some direct light source.
     The strongest effect of changing light occurs when the sun is going down and sunlight streams into our living room from the west-facing windows.  It is so wonderful to watch the sun’s effect as the rays slowly march across the room as sunset approaches.  The angle and intensity of the light plays on the art.  One of the most amazing effects occurred over a year ago when a perfect circle of sunlight acted like a spotlight to enclose the small bird in my Two Cats Captivated painting.  What really astounds me is that the painting was in the dining room down by the floor (where our cats could be eye-to-eye with their painted feline friends) and that circle of light seemingly came out of nowhere to highlight the source of their captivation.

​Two Cats Captivated (Spring 2014)

     The effect of light and shadow has played a large role in art for millennia.  One of the strongest effects occurs when one experiences an art object illuminated by the flickering light of an open flame.  I am so fortunate to have had the opportunity to watch masked dancers in a traditional longhouse setting.  Seeing the dancers in their masks perform in the firelight at the center of the longhouse created pure magic and a sense of otherworldliness for which they were intended.  As the dancers swirled, the masks were alternately illuminated and then obscured in shadow.  The dancers were no longer just family friends and former students; they had been transformed into something incredibly special.  The firelight took the dance to a whole other level.

Wolf Dancers A & B (Summer 2011)

     The effects of light and shadow are also greatly admired within the context of traditional Japanese culture.  Lacquerware made dining more appealing as it was developed to best show the effects of the dim flickering light produced by candlesticks and oil lamps.  Shoji screens and fusuma turned both natural and artificial light into a soft warm glow.  Karakami printing, with its mica-enriched paints, acted to reflect the light and brighten an otherwise dark room.  And screen painters like those from the Rinpa School used gold leaf for the background as a means of enhancing the light.  At the same time, the environment was designed to celebrate the darkness, and shadows were appreciated for the subtle effects they produced.  The best expression of this can be read in Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows.  To end this section, I have included several quotes from Tanizaki’s essay to give a better understanding of the appreciation for light and shadow in Japanese culture.

          “…in the still dimmer light of the candlestand, as I gazed at the trays and
      bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I
      discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness like that of a
      still, dark pond, a beauty I had not before seen. It had not been mere chance, I
      realized, that our ancestors, having discovered lacquer, had conceived such a
      fondness for objects finished in it.”

          “The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the
      realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came
      to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s
      ends.” 

         “And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a
      variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing
      else.”

         “This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this
      empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality
      of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.”

         “…we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the
​      light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”

Crow’s Shadow (Fall 2012)