Exploring the Shadows

A creative prompt that celebrates the contrast found in spring light.

My favorite kind of temporary tattoo.

A quick update before we get started: I’m doing a little experimental thing and offering a batch of Community Supported Art shares. It’s a batch of printed artwork from me, sent to you in two installments in June and September. If you want to sign up, click here.

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Welcome to the weekend Creative Fuel prompt, aimed at helping us tap into our creative process, no matter our medium. Today’s is going out to everyone!

If you like the prompt and want more, paid subscribers get a (mostly) weekly creative prompt sent on weekends and have full access to the archive of prompts. I very much appreciate you helping to make this work sustainable.

The weather has officially changed in the Pacific Northwest, and ample sunlight has been streaming in through the bright green new leaves of the maple trees.

The light this time of year is brighter, and it encourages a mood shift. I can physically feel it on my skin and in my body. After all, it’s easier to feel an embodied sense of lightness when the world around us is doing the same.

Things are growing, the days get longer and longer, and there’s a general sense of abundance in the natural world. Everything feels flooded with a “burgeoning verdancy,” as

Katherine May

put it this past week.

In the midst of that, I’m finding myself drawn to the shadows: the shadows of the ferns on the ground, the shadows of leaves as they sway in the wind, the shadows of branches that intersect the sun and leave the forest floor dotted with bursts of light.

When I look at trees and plants, there are distinct layers—the overlap of leaves, petals, and stems, the interplay of light and dark, the sun turning leaves into stained glass forest windows.

The light isn’t diffused and soft like it is in winter or on autumn afternoons. There’s a heightened intensity to the contrast of light and shadow this time of year—it’s incredibly concentrated. When those bursts of sunshine come out, it’s a welcomed antidote to the flat gray that blanketed the winter for months.

The shadows all around are a visual indicator to me of the brightness that the season holds. The sun leaving its imprint.

The word “shadow” of course is often imbued with a darker context. In the early 13^th century it was used to indicate “anything unreal” and later on even came to refer to a ghost. In the epic poem Beowulf, Grendel is a sceadugenga, a “shadow-goer,” a mythological shape shifter. More recently, we might recognize it in the Jungian shadow parts of ourselves, the “great unknown” that has made its way into modern psychology, and of course, on TikTok. Or even Julia Cameron’s definition of “shadow artists” in The Artist’s Way: artists who were not supported in early artistic endeavors, and therefore don’t see themselves as such.

In these contexts, we focus on the sense of darkness that shadow implies, its somberness. As Maria Popova writes, “we’ve seen shadows as a metaphor for the illusory and wicked aspects of life, for that which we must eradicate in order to illuminate the truth and inherent goodness of existence.”

A shadow doesn’t have a solitary existence, it’s being depends on a light source—we can’t have one without the other. It is as much an indicator of what light is there as it is a blocker of that light.

There is beauty in a shadow. It helps to define, it hones our focus, our eyes attune to what’s in the light and what isn’t. When you see a shadow of a plant cast against the wall, or spread out over the ground, there’s something magical within, as if that organism is morphing into another version of itself.

The shadow shifts and changes, entirely dependent on the light source, and disappearing once it’s gone.

Experimenting with papercut shadows.

As we shake off the final vestiges of darker days and head towards the summer solstice, the light continues to build and expand. The hours of daylight start to feel expansive, endless. There are plenty of celebrations to honor those shifts. I immediately think of Valborg in Sweden that marks the night before May Day with bonfires, and the Celtic tradition of Beltane honored with maypoles and often flames. The celebration of summer solstice and midsummer is no different: an embrace of the light.

I think about what happens when we stand around a fire, no matter what time of year. How the light flickers and twists into the sky, the front of our bodies lit up, dark shadows and shapes painted onto the ground behind us, placing us in between two worlds.

That same feeling of facing the light comes this time of year, when the spring sunshine bolts down and I close my eyes and tilt my face up meet it. A moment of existing solely in the warmth of the light, in the potential, in the promise of what’s next.

With that in mind, our creative prompt this weekend is all about shadows. Not because a shadow has us existing in the darkness, but because shadows are a call to see the light that’s seeping in.

To attune ourselves to what the shadow illuminates.

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Find shadows! Make shadows! Then ask this:

What does the shadow illuminate?

If you want a weekend drawing prompt that gets you out of your head, I would also recommend the classic drawing exercise of tracing shadows. That can be on paper, with chalk on the ground, or by some other method. Plants work great (hello ferns!) so do hands. Basically anything that will cast a shadow, which is pretty much most things.

Let the shadow be your muse.

A LITTLE CREATIVE INSPIRATION + OTHER TIDBITS

• I have an ongoing love of sharing shadow and light photos with my friends Julie Hotz and Gale Straub, and I would be remiss if I didn’t give them a thank you for creative shadow inspiration!

julieahotz

A post shared by Julie A Hotz (@julieahotz)

• I was very moved last weekend reading and looking at Will Matsuda’s work, in “The Trees That Survived in Hiroshima,” which is yet another creative exploration of shadows and darkness.

• Kumi Yamashita’s light and shadow work.

• “When you put fear and art together, it tends not to result in a great work. It doesn't touch people at a deeper level because it's based in something that I don't think most people resonate to, which is fear.” - Billy Corgan

• Ellsworth Kelly’s Shadows from Balcony, Meschers, 1950.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS!

PAPERCUT LETTERING [VIRTUAL]: SATURDAY MAY 20, 10AM TO 12PM PT

I’m teaching a virtual papercut lettering workshop on May 20th, so if you’ve been following along in these newsletters thinking “I want to cut letters like she does,” then come learn how!

SEATTLE-AREA WORKSHOPS

I am doing some in person workshops in June and July in the Seattle area as well. Find them all here.

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PREVIOUS PROMPTS TO EXPLORE

• Poetry in Motion

• What If We Were a Little More Analog?

• How Do You Collaborate With a Place?

• The Best Creative Constraints Are the Oblique Ones

• How Do We Create Light?

• Choose the Number Five

• What Are Our Rules?

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SUPPORT

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