Lake Cheston Chiaroscuro

A confession: I am a Caravaggio fanatic.  (See this post and this.)  I swoon before his paintings, in which strong directional light pulls form out of shadow, defining space on a flat plane.  The play of light and dark create an illusion of intensity frozen in space and time.  A master of chiaroscuro (chiaro [clear, light, bright] + scuro [dark]), he served up drama.  (And I majored in drama.)

Chiaroscuro: light-dark 

This morning, early, I walked around the lake, struck by sharp light knifing into the shadowy inner forest away from the water.  Standing at the edge of the trail, one arm shadowed and cool and the other spotlit and hot, I started thinking about Caravaggio, and everything I saw performed, as it were, on mini-stages like tableaux vivants.

Chiaroscuro: bright-dark

Then later, over lunch, a friend told me about his decision to speak up, bringing his light into a group's deep darkness, and I thought again of the characters thrust into the light created by a singular angular vision.

Chiaroscuro: clear-dark



Sometimes, what's clear makes the darkness more dark, sometimes less so, but always darkness makes light more beautiful, and those things in it stars.