Art has always been divisive. As long as there have been people creating, there have been people speaking about those creations, writing about them, screaming about them. Art and critique go hand in hand. Some say that the most important facet of a painting is balance, the use of negative space on the canvas, intelligent use of colours, perspective etc. Etc. Etc.
Those people are wrong.
The most important thing, the aspect that needs to be perfect for a true work of art, is light and shadow. How they play, connect, separate, exist together. The whole world is split into dark and light. Day and night, yin and yang, awake and asleep. I have spent my whole life in pursuit of this perfection, on capturing the true form of light and her doomed lover the shadow. For how could they be anything else? They are twined together in the very fabric of the universe and yet always held apart. Where one is, the other must follow.
It might be considered an obsession at this point. But oh, what a beautiful obsession.
How can an artist not be obsessed with trying to capture the way sunlight dapples through summer leaves, or how it hits a still ocean? That otherworldly glitter, like jewels, so beautiful it almost hurts the eye.
How can one not be drawn to the yawning darkness in the doorways of an abandoned building, or the pull of a deep-sea cave? Shadows that move and stir the soul, causing a prickle on the back of the neck like you’re being followed.
The unnatural glow of a neon light on a rain drenched evening. How the stars wash the night sky, light and dark reaching for one another even in the most remote of places.
They pine for each other, as I pine to capture them.
It is my life’s work, and I'm so close. So close to putting on canvas that feeling of stepping into a dim room after being outside. The rapid blink after turning on the light in the middle of the night. That pain as your pupils try desperately to adjust to the latest victor in this never-ending dance.
What a cruel irony it is that after devoting my being, my very soul, to sharing this vision with the world, that light abandons me. A penance for my hubris, for thinking I could ever pin light to something so terrestrial as paper or canvas. I stared at her brilliance for too long, and now I am left with only darkness. I understand now, the feeling of abandonment that darkness must feel when light flees from her.
I am darkness now, groping blindly, desperate for the warmth of my stolen lover. Is this why the night can feel so cold?
Does darkness grieve as I do?
Grieve all that she cannot have, all that she has given up just for a whisper of perfection?
I never got to experience the beauty of pure light, and now I have an eternity of pure darkness. Doomed to live as one half of a whole that will never be completed.