Shadows don't exist as things so much as as circumstances--as relations. Each is simply an absence of light. Shadows are nothings that we think of as somethings because light dominates in the visual realm with the consequence that shadows appear as distinct individual entities, patches, mottlings and skeins. As a shadow grows in scale (as light recedes) it’s character transforms from a thing to a phenomenon: it becomes an general cast; no longer on the order of things but an absence; of light, and we call this absence darkness. No longer is the shadow graspable by vision but instead it encompasses vision, starves it or overwhelms it. A shadow is no more a thing than a vacuum or nothingness.
"Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing." — Ray Bradbury
And yet shadows are rarely empty
They are filled with the soft ambience of reflected light
Both partial darkness and partial illumination combined
In which subtle modulations of light and half light
Merge and interweave
A penumbra
A semidarkness in which may be perceived
A boundless play of tonalities.
They are filled with the soft ambience of reflected light
Both partial darkness and partial illumination combined
In which subtle modulations of light and half light
Merge and interweave
A penumbra
A semidarkness in which may be perceived
A boundless play of tonalities.
For Dr.art Aija Druvaskalne-Urdze 1963 – 2010.
