In a room that is a bright white, when lights are turned on at night, the objects in the room throw shadows, creating contrasts and subtle gradations. They look like something shaded with a charcoal stick or pencil on a white sheet of paper; there’s a sense of the abstract seen in photos and paintings. Shadow and light evoke images, things seen, like when people look up at the clouds and see (observe) elephants or horses. The pictures at night in a room are endless. As children, we might remember monsters lurking around or imaginary friends. The contrasts of light and shadow are a powerful stimulation that creates a remembrance of the ocean and forests, the cities during the night.
What are light and shadow in a room? Is it a tool to give our souls a feeling of tranquility or rest? Maybe there is more to a shadow? As we peer into one, what is it saying? From a shadow, anything can be imagined maybe it’s saying something, but one has to wait, light on an object casting a shadow, drawing what one feels. What was and is possible as not that deep of a shadow becomes a very light gray. One shadow overlaps the other, creating subtle gradations of gray. They form patterns and shapes that gradually change as the sun changes, interfered with by clouds traveling across the sky. A window interferes with light coming into a room, and the density of the shadows changes, creating overlapping gradations of gray.
In the mythical world, artists cast shadows on glass and transparent materials to form those images without chemical or photographic methods. Once the clouds are fixed on these translucent panels, the artist can move them around, and color can be added with the touch of a finger.
In the buildings of the mythical world, shadows are used as decorative elements, but shadows change depending on the material things in the structure; there are physical elements that come out on the facilities every day depending on the time of the day and where the sun is. A technique was developed to keep shadows fixed in the three-dimensional world of reality. They are becoming solid as stone or steel. These solid shadows intertwine with light from the sun and lamps streaming through stained glass windows. Some light comes in that already has a color from somewhere as it comes from the sun through some elements in the atmosphere.
Strange buildings exist composed of shadow and light, but there is a solidity to them; it’s like living in a place made of brightly frosted glass with gleaming intensity and light-darkish gray glass as if looking through sunglasses. Through a wall resembling a stone with an inner light, the sun and shadow are projected as if by magic; the operator adjusts the wall by using hand gestures and thought. Sometimes a structure seems to have feelings of its growing, forming into specific ways as it wishes to. Some artists play around with these shadows and sunlight, creating 3D images or drawings that can be seen in the round without a computer, which artists in the mythical world never use. Imagine pictures of fish swimming through sunlight or even real ones. This type of sunlight is a cross between water and light. Basins that hold this type of water-light that its brightness become very intense at the command of an operator it’s used as lights when night comes. People put this water light in all kinds of variously shaped receptacles, creating decorations along walkways.
A shadow with an inner glow that is used in the houses of imagination as screens or partitions by the people of (Sare-Anoli) Sadasna in the southern regions of the mythical world. The shadow screens are used to build houses. They are just solid as any building material; an interior is a place of bright twilight. The dim light has an amber hue nothing of the outside world enters. A house built of shadow keeps the people inside safe. This means it’s dark inside, which is not true; whatever object is inside is seen because the shadows are of different degrees of darkness; there is a very light gray, perhaps an intermixing of light and shadow. When touched or seen with the eye, objects are illuminated by sunlight, or somehow, the shadow becomes a dark light. Things glow in the interior of the house. Sometimes it’s like the night with a star above, as if the whole universe is there.
Shadow and light are used as artwork, cast shadows on objects and create patterns and forms arranged and rearranged by the artist as if drawing on paper. As sunlight comes into a room, it casts shadows of things; these shadows can be manipulated into the third dimension as if they were solid; the artist bends the darkness from the floor and grabs other parts of it as if it were made of clay. Some people call them crafters of the shadow. They work with the primary shadow. Also, light, bending, pressing, cutting, doing anything possible as done with clay, metal, wood, stone, plastic, or all solid materials. Decorative bowls are created with intricate patterns of shadow and light; there are moments when they can be used to hold water, but at other times, the bowl has no substance.
The interplay of light and shadow in the physical sense is like working with clay, metal, or wood; artists and crafters in the mythical world do this.
Robert J. Matsunaga
