Interplay
8 creative works found
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Tree bark gives me many possibilities to imagine different worlds. The carvings often look cave hieroglyphics from an ancient and primitive culture. The images on this tree can also suggest primitive carvings;however I interpreted this scene as a midnight village. The buildings are lit up and the expanse of space looks like a village. Where it is located is the intriguing question? This could be a view from a vessel in outer space or a settlement on Earth. What creates the drama of this vibrantly colored abstract is that the viewer is drawn in to project whatever / he or she perceives in this lively interplay of light and objects. More imagery will appear by viewing this image in the larger format. /
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everpresent everywhere
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Second in an occassional series of ‘The Interplay of Light and Shade’ in the ragmanesque-style ~ collect a unique series of cards
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Taken in the Northern Territory of Australia, I’m calling this one “Shadow Tickle” because it looks to me like the organic, soft tendril-like “fingers” of the tree’s shadow are trying to tickle and cajole the hard, industrial cinder blocks into a better mood- like some sort of game between two very good but very opposite friends. The warm and dappled lighting makes me feel as though the wall is laughing despite itself.
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The First in an occassional series of ‘The Interplay of Light and Shade’ in the ragmanesque-style ~ collect a unique series of cards
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Simple date palm leaves in the late afternoon sun…..
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Interplay of Light and Shade
by ragmanThe Interplay of light and shade Who needs colour when we have the magic of monochrome. Black and white photography is about light …
The Interplay of light and shade Who needs colour when we have the magic of monochrome. Black and white photography is about light and shade, and shape and form. The subjects, the scenes, the studies, the scenarios we work from are to say the least simple, common, ordinary. How we see them depends on light, how we as an artist turn them from the ordinary into the extraordinary is simply that little bit extra. It is the connectivity, the translation, the interpretation that we make, sorry create! / Everpresent Everywhere It is light, first of all as enlightenment, it is as James Joyce put, beholding. Secondly it is light, i.e. using the light that comes from above, for we are indeed ‘painting with light’. Thirdly it is light, how we use that light to illuminate, i.e. to reveal, like the spotlight on a work of art, or a ‘super-trooper’ focusing on the artiste, dancer or musician on the stage. Fourthly and finally it is light. Light as a colour or tone on our palette to feature or as emphasis and it this we wish to address in this article. Since the beginning of time, humans have strived to discover and understand what light exactly is. Light has had a great impact on our culture, and as photographers painting with light, we need to stress it in our portrayal of our culture through images. / Bruges Lamplight It’s all Greek these postulations on photography In the fifth century BC, Empedocles postulated that everything was composed of four elements; / - fire, air, earth, and water. He believed that Aphrodite made the human eye out of the four elements and that she lit the fire in the eye which shone out from the eye making sight possible. However if this were true, then one could see during the night just as well as during the day, so Empedocles postulated an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays from a source such as the sun. Then in about 300 BC, Euclid wrote Optica, in which he studied the properties of light. Euclid postulated that light travelled in straight lines and he described the laws of reflection and studied them mathematically. He questioned as to whether indeed that sight is the result of a beam from the eye, for he asks how one sees the stars immediately, if one closes one’s eyes, then opens them at night. Of course if the beam from the eye travels infinitely fast this is not a problem. In 55 BC, Lucretius, a Roman who carried on the ideas of earlier Greek atomists, wrote: “The light and heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted by the shove.” – On the nature of the Universe. / Despite being similar to later particle theories, Lucretius’s views were not generally accepted and light was still theorized as emanating from the eye. Ptolemy (c. 2nd century) wrote about the refraction of light, and developed a theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes. / Le Corbusier’s creative approach of the architect In his 1923 famous book ‘Vers une Architecture’ (‘Towards an Architecture’) Le Corbusier pleads the case of the new language, when writing about the underlying structure of primitive shapes, concluding that the primary geometric forms should be used to embody the Architecture of the age of the machine. ~ “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: and the interplay of light and shade reveal these forms: cubes, cones, spheres, and cylinders or pyramids as the great primary forms which light reveal to advantage. The image of these is distinct and tangible within us and without ambiguity. It is the reason that these are beautiful forms.” He establishes the relationship between the plan and its surroundings: ‘The plan proceeds from within to without; the exterior is the result of the interior, The elements of Architecture are light and shade, wall and space.’ Through this fusion, architecture focuses on space and volumes and their interaction rather than the two-dimensional cosmetic treatment of the ‘Façade’. To understand the spirit of the place and the atmospheric space contain it is thus important that we as photographers cause the connectivity through careful and appropriate application of the interplay of light and shade alongside the emphasis of shape and form. But to what purpose we will find in the next section. / Steps of Vitre Castle Diorama or Drama The painter Giorgio de Chirico once wrote: “There are more enigmas in the shadow of a man who walks in the sun than in all the religions of the past, present and future. “De Chirico, who coined the term “metaphysical painting” while working with Carlo Carrà in 1917, may here have been speaking both as a painter and a metaphysician. If not automatically an enigma, it is at least mildly paradoxical that shadows can enlighten: that seeing some parts of what we see less well than others can help us to understand the whole of what we see better. Not being able to make out one edge of what might otherwise look like a triangle can lead you to realise you’re looking at a cone, for example. Yet de Chirico was mainly referring to the mood or feeling which shadow can generate, in art as in life. Its eminent usefulness in helping us to see form and perceive distance has not prevented it from being freighted down with all sorts of symbolic baggage. In folk tales, In folk tales, Gothic novels and film noir, shadows are premonitions, harbingers of threat and death. Western painting and its literature has tended to set shadow seemingly contrasting tasks: to define yet blur form, but also the use of shadows also to create mood. Western painting, or the representational tradition which has so dominated it, has tended to set shadow two seemingly contrasting tasks: to clothe, locate and define form – to make the picture’s flat surface appear to contain solid objects in space, producing something which looks real – and to lend a gloss of mystery or drama to the illusion created. Often in art, though less so in ordinary acts of seeing, there is a difference between shadow in general and shadows in particular. A strong or precisely-directed light source casts shadows which closely resemble a cross section of an object placed in its path. The process is itself a kind of representation. Both Pliny the Elder and Quintilian cited the outlining of a shadow as a primal artistic act, but they disagreed about where this originating myth took place and the people involved in it. Pliny tells how the Corinthian Maid, daughter of the potter Butades, drew around her lover’s silhouette on a wall to remember him before he went abroad; for Quintilian it was a shepherd tracing his shadow on the ground with a stick. Both parables locate the origins of drawing in a kind of state of nature: domestic intimacy and romantic attachment in the former case, Arcadian pastoral in the latter. Both also feed off the transience of the shadow, its power to suggest absence as well as presence. Tomorrow his mapped shadow will be all the Maid has to remind her of. / Seat of Rene Magritte Eclectic Emphasis Conventional histories of Western painting begin not in antiquity – from which period inconveniently few examples have survived – but with the Renaissance. / Chiaroscuro is derived from the Italian, chiaro ~ light and oscuro ~ dark. Interplay, a variety or contrast of light and dark, is the use of marked light and shade contrasts for a dramatic effect in art. The earliest and best examples of this where to be found as a hallmark of baroque paintings, this dramatic interplay of light and dark to create tension, drama or excitement as a means of drawing attention. Shadow, or chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and shade, is mostly identified by Renaissance authors and later historians as a form-giving device, the handmaiden of perspective. But shadows are occasionally allocated a more pointed meaning. In the 1420s, Masaccio and Masolino organised their frescoes in the Carmelite church in Florence around clear and consistent depictions of light. Every scene in the cycle is lit as if by the chapel’s single high window. This consistency and clarity is most telling in Masaccio’s depiction of St Peter healing the sick with his shadow. The shadow falls in, as it were, the “right” place, as if Peter were being lit from the window to his left or our right. What looks like a straight reversal of the usual symbolism of menace and gloom may instead be a crafty reference to the death and resurrection of Christ – one flashes forward to the more obvious The Shadow of Death by Holman Hunt (1870-1873), in which a young Jesus seems to be doing some sort of yoga pose while his shadow organises itself into a crucifixion behind him. In the Masaccio, Peter’s shadow passes over each of four unfortunates in turn; it is their restoration to the light which allows them to rise to their feet. The revolutionary intensity of Masaccio’s desire to represent, to paint figures who look as though they’re there, can be seen in religious terms as a kind of incarnation. Peter casts a shadow because he exists – or he exists because he casts a shadow. Making a miracle seem plausible to the point of ordinariness was itself, at the time, a miraculous achievement. Nevertheless, the idea that Peter’s shadow is off doing good works on his behalf hints at a darker and more paradoxical tradition. Our shadows are our twins, our ghosts, our doppelgängers. Their relationship with us goes beyond the merely fraternal. The dramatic or even melodramatic properties of chiaroscuro have been exploited by artists for centuries, most effectively by the followers of Michelangelo da Caravaggio in seventeenth-century Rome, Naples, France and Holland. These so-called tenebristi or “shadowists” started from a dark ground, laying lighter colours over this to suggest the sparing and directed fall of light across the subject being depicted, picking out little details for the viewer and lending the whole scene a monumental, sombre presence. Light even corrals shadow into shadows here and there (as with the basket of fruit that throws a shadow in the shape of a fish’s tail in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601) at the National Gallery, an encrypted Christian symbol which subtly underpins the picture’s message of concealment and revelation). The artist’s touch can itself somehow be equated with light, and so with all the qualities light suggests. Weaving illuminated form out of inchoate darkness is a life-giving act with almost divine implications (“Let there be light!”). Yet the paintings are often set in what look very much like jail cells. You could call this ironic in that Caravaggio for one had first-hand experience of such interiors; you could also call it truthful, in that jail is where a lot of martyrdoms, for example, take place. But the abiding implication is that corporeal human life is a benighted state which even divine light often struggles to penetrate. Just as with Masaccio’s striving after objectivity, the apparent pessimism of the tenebristi allows modern viewers to disregard their work’s religious and allegorical content and see it as merely truthful. Since the mid-nineteenth century it has been photography – especially monochrome photography – rather than painting in which this long-standing dependence on shadow to elucidate form and create mood has flourished (another way in which Caravaggio’s paintings appear modern to us is that they look a little like photographs). Influence and Inspiration / Be afraid, be very afraid My own work has very much been inspired by two directions. One is the influence of Film directors and producers, and my predominance of this practice of dramatic black and white comes from first of all two people. Alfred Hitchcock of The Birds, Psycho, etc. left a legacy of suspense and intrigue and airs of mystery and twist. Secondly Carol Reed director of The Third Man, who I will always associate as the male director with a female name directing the leading character Holly Martins another strong impressive male with a female name. However what legacy is left with me is his dramatic lighting and film sets, which gave introduce the monochrome’s twin towers ~ light and shade, and shape and form in combination and fusion for intensity and impact, something which is not lost on my own work. The other direction was of Brassaï’s Paris nocturnes, Ansel Adams’s sublime landscapes, Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moments, Edward Weston’s nudes and still-life’s – all seem sketched in shadow rather than light. Even photographers who engaged more closely with the avant-garde and used the camera – or various camera-less photographic processes – to pursue the Modernist goal of abstraction, or to explore Modernist ideas of machine-made art, found themselves drawn to shadow as a resource, if not exactly a subject. I was reminded by Mark (Irish79) one of our own Redbubble photographers introduction of a home reversed image which brought to mind Man Ray’s famous Rayographs which are essentially negatives of shadows, luminous outlines of objects placed on a light-sensitive sheet which is then exposed (the process being oddly reminiscent of the Corinthian Maid). László Moholy-Nagy did something similar with his “photograms”; he also photographed layers of transparent material to create delicate, calligraphic patterns of diffracted shadow. In the 1970s Andy Warhol, an artist much exercised by the mechanical production and reproduction of images, made a series of “shadow pictures” which negated the old equation of shadow with formlessness (the let-there-be-light thing) by laying crisp silk-screened shadows over messily hand-painted backgrounds. Let me finish by encouraging you to look at my own abstract reality, and how these things I have spoken off have contributed in some shaded sentences or sentinels. / The Third Man I had Carol Reed’s direction and the two characters played by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in mind when I took this capture. The only odd thing about it was that I wasn’t in Vienna 1949, I was in Nice and it was 1999, fifty years later. Light Triangle This was captured in a medieval town Perouges, in the South of France where scenes from the Three Musketeers film where shot. Light Triangle is one of my favourites because it demonstrates the interplay of light and shade, and how light can be bent in direction to focus on other elements or components of the image / New Light through Old Windows Captured in a cottage in Cultra, chosen as a manifestation of the power of the path of light and how it illuminates the subject. It was my first ‘Chiaroscuro’ image (light on the dark obscure) and lead to my study of, and collection of images on the subject of the ‘Interplay of Light and Shade’ / Temple of the winds ~ Light on staircase Also close to my home is Mount Stewart National Trust property on the Ards Peninsula on the shores of Strangford Lough and a near-by peculiar building in the estate is the circular Temple of the Winds. The staircase is lit by just two windows as you ascend the stairs; and my eye saw the sweeping curving balustrade silhouetted against the light and also the light shadow patterns on the wall. It is another example of the Interplay of light and shade on a surface. / / Ragman
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