Light...Merry and Bright

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

Walk-in kaleidoscope by Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki

Light’s absence seems to demand that it is at center of everything these days. Maybe it’s the long, dark days of winter, especially in the high latitudes of Minnesota. Maybe it’s the magical pathway of moonlight on the snow. Still, light seems to draw us even when days are long and the sun is high; even then, sunlight shimmering on water is marvelous. Fireworks explode and bedazzle. Light fascinates, illuminates, inspires, connects, and fills space.

Light fascinates. Babies are drawn to the light, eyes fixed on light’s sparkle on a spoon, foil, glass, jewelry. Children are captivated as light shines, shimmers, and scatters in reflections, rainbows, and shadows.

Photo credits below

Light illuminates and opens the world with meaning, metaphor, and the material nature of the world. To give light to children learning to read and doing their schoolwork, hundreds of these inflatable solar-powered lanterns are being sent to rural Tanzania. 

  

Light inspires. Energy with a kind of poetry, light reveals possibilities even through the smallest cracks. Light borrows from the day to transform night’s darkness, lighting what can otherwise be difficult to see.

James Turrell's Sky Pesher, 2005. Walker Art Center

 

Solar art glass (Sarah Hall Studio)

Light connects, spills and spreads around us, wraps us in its warmth, leads us forward.

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space 

Light fills space flooding it with warmth and color. Moving in shafts, waves, and handfuls, light beams and bounces, pools; fills, flickers, fragments; glistens, glows and glimmers.

Beauty, possibility, remembrance, and hope. Wishing you a brighter 2015.  
 

Photo credits for above: 

(L) Shadow-ing by P.H. Fitzgerald; (C) Manning School, Jamaica Plain MA; (R) Kentucky Science Center

(L) National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; Kidspace entry (Pasadena, CA) 
Suprasensorial at the Hirschhorn. Chromosaturation (1965 and refabricated 2012) by Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-Diez