There is no beauty without shadows. I was not the first to have this idea, but I had it on my own, much of it as a result of contemplation.
We have epiphanies every day, we are just too busy to consider them. Probably this is the reason why a small epiphany does not turn so often into a big epiphany, or even into That Epiphany.
My revelation was the result of contemplating the idea of blindness, of the blind poet, that is. You might argue that there is beauty in the realm of sound, or of touch, but we would enter into a discussion about the different meanings of the word "shadow". This could end well but it could also end in some kind of moral hermeneutics, which, while not being a bad thing in itself, might hinder the initial purpose of my whole argument.
To enter abruptly into the idea that generated my work, as well as my little revelation, would do no good, given the fact that the generative impulse which I can recognise is just the top of an iceberg of motivations which remain most of the time hidden.
And psychoanalyzing myself through my work sure is a thing, but not one that I would gladly do in public.
What is to be done then? I could point to you that blindness is a serious problem which gives perception a whole new realm above which to hover. I could argue that shadows are somehow irrelevant in a world where light counts mostly as generated heat, if you do not want to give to the word "shadow" the meaning of a pause into the manifestation of a wave. I know this would be at most an imperfect definition, while for some of us, better trained in physics, optics or just knowing more about waves, it might seem like a simple idiocy, but that came to mind. Forgive me for not being a genius.
The problem of the shadow arised when I did not feel like illustrating the shadows cast by the objects I painted, eventhough I did paint their self shadow. It gave my painting an eerie feeling of incompletness, but I believe it is the key towards its complete understanding. It does not offer the solution to the riddle, it just opens a path you may choose to walk upon or not. As I have said on other occasions, a painting, or any piece of art, speaks even louder about the beholder than about itself, or about the one bringing it to the status of candidate for appreciation. If you are prone to choosing the easy path, you could place your judgement upon the artist and emphasize his perceived laziness. If you are prone to thoroughly search for an answer to the problems life throws in front of you, as life has the bad habit of doing, you might notice that there is always a choice in everything everyone does, and sometimes, the extended amount of time needed to make a choice might hint upon a more profound reason than might appear at first glance.
That is, watching or interacting with an artist's work challenges your sense of identity and, in doing so, turns that candidate for appreciation into a work of art. Art does not exist by itself, not even as an ideal, because Ideas could not appear in the absence of the power of contemplation, regardless of whether you perceive this power as given or springed in the process of our evolution as a species.
Therefore there is no art without your version of it and it matters a lot what you can and choose to perceive and understand from what is given to you through your senses.
That's why this work is not about Homer, or his acquired or innate ability to appreciate reality in terms of waves, more than it is about me and you and the way we choose our path in this world given to us through imperfect senses, supplemented by the efforts of an equally imperfect, though improvable, mind.
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