Art, Lights, and a Festive Night
Celebrate Riverside’s vibrant art scene with free gallery access and a special photo show, all while taking in the magic of the Festival of Lights.
A prompt to encourage your practice of creativity this week from Riversider and local author Larry Burns.
Welcome back, you magnetic personalities! Last week, we found ourselves uncontrollably pulled in by a magnet's force of attraction and repulsion; we cultivated a sense of wonder using an unseen energy that shapes our world. What kinds of art did you create while testing Newton's Third Law of Motion? Did this magical invisible hand assist you in laying down some mesmerizing patterns with iron filings or constructing a daze of a maze that challenged your spatial reasoning? Are you still humming from a symphony of magnetic vibrations? If so, let's direct that energy reserve into several minutes of play using this week's creative nudge.
Today, we're turning our attention to something less weightier than a dense magnet. This week's nudge is a constant companion all day, every day. Well, at least from sunrise to sunset! Quick, turn around because this week's creative nudge is a shadow! Yes, the elusive and ever-changing shadow realm is where we will hang out today to experience several minutes of creative contemplation.
These dark silhouettes, cast by objects that intercept light, have captivated human imagination for centuries. From the playful shadow puppets of childhood to the dramatic chiaroscuro paintings of the Renaissance, shadows have played a vital role in art, storytelling, and our understanding of light and perception. Now it's our turn to bend and play with the light of day, using one or more of the following creative games to get us started:
Shadows are not merely absences of light but rather dynamic forms that dance and transform with the changing angles of illumination. They can distort familiar shapes, create illusions of depth and movement, and even reveal hidden details that might otherwise go unnoticed. These are all great qualities to harness for creative exploration. Like me, I hope you feel a little lighter after embracing the darkness at your door and letting the lengthening shadows lead you on a creative journey of perception, illusion, and artistic expression.
As we engage with these creative exercises, let's appreciate the shadow's ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, to reveal hidden dimensions, and to inspire new ways of seeing. Shadows remind us that light and darkness are intertwined, and that even the absence of light can be a source of beauty and creativity.
This column was written with the help of Google's Gemini Advanced, a powerful generative AI writing tool.
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