I love the morning light in our house. For the past ten years, we've lived in a 160 year old former church in a small village alongside the Susquehanna River, a brooding two story block of brick and stone with ten and a half foot high ceilings on the first floor, and double that upstairs in the former sanctuary. Large but widely spaced double hung windows break through the masonry at regular intervals along the east and west walls, parallel to East Market Street as well as the building's spine. It is a wide building, and the windows in the living and dining area and adjoining kitchen, while opening onto views of the brick patio and side yard, face west, away from the rising sun. The light that filters in during the early hours is indirect, so the inner reaches of these rooms are layered in shadow, even as hints of a brilliant morning beckon through panes of glass. It is this zone, where colors are soft and subtle, thick with the dark, with the profiles of objects emerging from shadow, that I am captivated by. It is only with reluctance that I turn on lights to chase away the delicious ambiguity of these quiet interiors. The Japanese writer Jun'ichirÅ Takizaki wrote a gem of an essay in the early 1930s entitled In Praise of Shadows which was translated into English, making the case for the aesthetic richness and mystery that lurk in the darkness, and saying it with far more eloquence than I could hope to do, at least in words.
living room with Talbert Rhodesian, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, Derwent Inktense pencils
Scott A. Stultz
