A Shadow

Young enough to cause trouble and old enough to be trusted unsupervised, I broke off from the pack of students I was supposed to be with, feigning having to use the bathroom. A quick hop and a skip, and I was off. I didn't like that we had to digest art according to rules on a paper and I didn't like that I was here to fill out twenty questions about dates and locations, not the art itself.

Art isn't supposed to be digested according to the rules.

So I snuck off, choosing the room closest to the group anyway so I could claim I got lost if anything. A rebel, but not a dumb one.

No one was there.

Not a soul.

To this day, I've never seen a set of rooms so empty at that place. It must have been luck. Fate. Fortune. Whatever.

The place I stumbled into was full to bursting with oil paintings, some so much larger than life that I was left open-mouthed and in shock. The room, bland in and of itself, fell away completely beside the ornate frames and the heavily contrasted colors on the canvas. The worlds and their stories bled out of the paintings until I choked on them.

Eyes bulged in terror but worse were the shadows darkening the wrinkles on their weathered faces. I knew that feeling. Those trenches were in my soul. The play of dark and light froze me immediately in my spot. This was art. The kind of thing that buried fingers in your soul and pulled you apart. It tricked you into thinking that pain was pretty just so that it could crawl inside your thoughts and nest in your head.

I had stumbled into a wing containing Baroque art.

Just as inadvertently, I had stumbled into a deep passion for chiaroscuro in art and photography. Lightning had struck my soul.

As a result, I saw contrasts everywhere. Measuring light with shadow then became a main staple in my own photography. I played with all sorts of setups, gradually leaning closer and closer to photographs that mimicked the feeling I got in my chest when I first looked up at those paintings.

With almost a desperate fervor, I worked on trying to catch that feeling. I wanted to capture the moment the light went black. Occasional snaps of lightning sparked my interest but it didn't hold. There had to be movement. There had to be something human interwoven in the image.

There was an undeniable emotion in all those images, a kind of warmth that played with a hard freeze, that I could not manage to capture.

Then, I turned my attention to different sources of light. This particular picture was a result of one studying session where I played with a lighter that simultaneously lit up red, green, and blue. I expected the warmth of the flame plus the LEDs and the sunlight coming into a blue room would confuse the camera a bit. It did.

It wasn't the first or even the fourth picture that evoked a similar sense of freeze and fire in me but more like the twentieth. Then I shot something that made me stop.

The colors of this photo immediately pleased me. It was not something I could replicate, not if I tried. The color I landed on, the hour of the day, the grey sky, the height and movement of the flame, none of it was something I could mimic if I tried. There was something innately human in that variability. There was a story.

That was, as it turned out, to be the most important significant aspect of art like this. It needed a story. And of course, I would be drawn to that.