Radiance and Shadow
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
I have long held the belief that art is about revelation, about making the invisible visible.
Creating the intangibles such as hope and wonder. Or awe or a sense of belonging or of self-empowerment or so many other feelings and emotions. Revealing these unseen intangibles is what art can and should do.
It’s a lofty and often evasive goal. The harder one tries specifically to do just that, to create these intangibles, the further one moves from that goal.
In my experience, it only happens when you can release yourself into the work, letting your mind focus on each element in each moment. Finding the rhythm and voice, one individual moment at a time. One stroke, one line, leads to the next and if you allow yourself to follow the guidance being given by what is in front of you, slowly the gap between the visible and the invisible closes, that gap suddenly filled with an emotion, a feeling that gives voice to the work.
This particular painting, Radiance and Shadow, fits into that idea for me, filling me with the wonder I get from a full moon’s light on a snow-covered landscape. The way the light is cast on the reflective snow creates a sense of something new in the familiar. The scene you’ve witnessed day after day takes on a different feel, filled with a paradoxical sense of mystery and revelation that comes from new shadows and new light.
You can almost sense the quiet as all sound is hushed and absorbed by the snow. It’s a quiet that reminds you of the stillness that you imagine your ancestors knew well in earlier times when there was less extraneous sound in world with fewer people and machines. And from that quiet a feeling of peacefulness and security arises to accompany that initial sense of wonder.
And suddenly the simple arrangement of paint and lines and shapes becomes something more. Complete and a thing unto itself. The intangible made tangible.
And that in itself becomes a wonder to me…
This post first ran again about this time six years back. I changed out the painting at the top for one that now hangs in my studio. I am also adding a piece of music that fits the tone of this post and the painting. It is titled Quietude. It was written by harpist/composer Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961) and is performed here by Judy Loman.
Redtree Times 