Quest of tail chase: Dance of Light and Dark
When we speak of uncovering truth, most people will associate this process with light dissolving the darkness, although it’s safe to say that darkness of the night sky exposes brilliance of stars while sunlight conceals them, and the depth of cosmos exposes brightness of the sun and not the other way around.
Both light and dark have revealing and concealing qualities depending on how they are applied.
However, obscurity isn’t the same as darkness.
Obscure and occult — are a reference for something being hidden from view or something obstructing the view,
Think about fog/gas, bright light and veils/barriers of any form. A curtain or a wall can perfectly obstruct a view, and fog isn’t dark and yet it obstructs your vision.
A thick white veil can become an obstructive influence.
Strong light doesn’t always work like an X Ray — in fact, often strong lighting can provoke an opposite reaction and make us close our eyes, and in other cases permanent damage, like blindness.
See, I like to throw shade to expose form and it’s just something I picked up from art class.
What not many people know about me is that I was actually studying design in college. This also comes with drawing and painting lessons as well as photography.
Visual artists have a keen understanding of spectral balance, contrasting, shading, working with different light qualities and positioned from different perspectives.
There is a fine understanding of how lights and shadow come into play, how they define and outline sceneries, how they give out the illusions, textures and shapes.
My approach to drawing was unlike many of my colleagues, because I tend to map out sketches by application of shadows — shadows were my guideline to perception of forms,
And I’ve had my share of complaints from a lot of people, since I wear my shades all the time, I’ll tell you more:
In college I’ve actually had an argument with my painting professor because I wore sunglasses to art classes— and I’ve literally told him that, I can see far better with my shades on, because there were multiple light sources of different quality -
Neon, regular yellow light bulbs, and daylight coming out of huge windows in the facility.
I was dead serious — the light was highly counterproductive — because it was no longer highlighting shapes of the objects we were meant to paint. Forms of objects were drowning in light.
If there wasn’t for polarity the world would drown and cease to exit or at least cease being perceivable. Fading to dark and fading to light isn’t a solution. Admiration is.
Now,
How distracted we become by shiny objects, we fail to see it as a distraction from everything else, by the way something grabs our attention.
“Not everything that glitters is gold” — however, it does catch out attention for some reason, and it’s up to us to figure out why it does.
It’s not a coincidence that often the best way to hide something from view, is to hide it in plain sight. Ever been searching for keys, while holding them in your hands?
We disarm our security system because somehow we believe that “it would be too obvious, too simple” if we already knew the truest answer. In our need to overcomplicate things, we oversee the reality, discredit over our intuition and neglect our true feelings.
Leonardo da Vinci once said — ‘A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.' But he was only half right, because things are not exposed by either dark or light — they are exposed by CONTRAST.
So, no.
Darkness and Obscurity are not the same. But it’s certainly funny at the end of the day, how come we didn’t realize so many things sooner.
