Chiaroscuro of Life
Deep shadows serve to emphasize the light
The interplay of light and dark informs the art style known as chiaroscuro, which uses the shadows to push the background further away, and bring a single focal point to the viewer. It isn’t a total isolation, usually - in the photo I’ve taken of the Henbit in my garden, you can see the other vegetation around it. And, if this had been lit with a more diffuse glow from the sun, you might be hard-pressed to pick out all the details, from the frilled ruff of leaf under each circlet of blooms, to the velvety caps of the florets themselves.
When I was taking these photos, I was taking advantage of the very low angle of the sun, just before sunset, to capture images that were highly contrasted light-and-dark. I was also using the focus mentally to help myself step away from the turmoil of my thoughts. I wanted to black out the chaos, to light up just the one thing I was doing, so that I could regain inner balance and be able to sort through my head after I’d taken a moment to meditate. My meditation isn’t the sort I used to think of where you empty your mind - I’m incapable of achieving that, when I try the brain slips into overdrive and I start vividly imagining all the catastrophes that can come of whatever jarred me from the outside. Instead, I have to find something, some task I can use so that I can cast illumination in sharp focus, while everything else fades into shadow for a time. Centered, composed, then I can come back in from the garden (or whatever I was doing) and get done what needs to be done. Even if that doing is to not do anything. There are times you can’t do anything, so it’s better to do nothing than to make it worse through unwise action.
Scaphrophaga fly, the name literally means shit-eater. I could allow that to be a particularly unpleasant personal memory, or I could sit on the bench holding two pounds of intricately machined metal and glass that is mine, I bought it with my own money, I am alive and victorious in my garden. He cannot touch me from beyond the grave. The scars never go away. The damage twists and surfaces in me and my children from time to time, but in the end, we are light. We were light in the darkness, and it cannot hold us. We fly away, leaving it in the past while the future is a sunbeam piercing the clouds.
A friend sent me the song recently, and after listening, I knew I had to come back to finish this essay. It had been on my mind, inchoate and I was afraid, incoherent. Looking into the shadows of my mind is rarely pleasant. Without the dark, though, we don’t appreciate the light. Having been in the valley of the shadow, I came out loving the sun’s rays on my face, both physically and metaphorically. Ironic, isn’t it, that the stress of that shadowed journey triggered an autoimmune response that denies me the kiss of the sun on my skin?
Art needs shadow. The failure of many new artists is not pushing the shadows deep enough, hard enough, to separate the values and bring out the subject of their work into clear definition. The death of the oak leaf is slow, but sure, a shadow creeping over it as it decays. The growth of the new green things is fed by the decomposition of the leaves like it, and when it ultimately melds back into the black earth whence it came, their seeds are given new life and promise that in another season, they will emerge and start all over again. We do not know an ending, only a time of rest and renewal into a different form. There will always be work to be done. There will always be the shuddering pain of severance from light, as the sun sets, but being human, we can know that the warmth and illumination will return from another angle, bringing out new perspectives.
So long as we draw breath, we are light. Hope illumines us in the shadows that would swallow us whole, forgotten, unseen, drawn into the gullet of hell itself. We stand in the ray of light, our life cast into the shadows all around us, and we glow. We contain the light, and we focus it on what we work on, mindful, creating beauty in the midst of night’s peace and stillness. Even starlight is enough, when we have swallowed the sun. Do not despair. Do not let the darkness win.
