Chiaroscuro Quotes

“Our room swallowed light whole. Even in summer when sunlight glared through the windows, it was somehow dim inside. Now it was only Easter morning, and the muted sky of early spring offered scant relief to our tenebrous room. On our side of the house a gnarled and ancient oak tree spread its reach across the back facade of the house as if to shade and protect us. One of the massive branches of its principal fork reached invitingly right up to our window to offer to take us wherever we wanted to go. This great limb, with circumference grander than both of us together, was our stairway to heaven and our secret exit to the ground; it was our biplane in the Great War of our imaginations and a magic carpet to Araby; it was our lookout post and the clubhouse of our most secret fraternal order; it was our secret passageway through the imaginary castle we made of our house. It was our escape from the darkness into the light.”
― Mason West

“Chiaroscuro, from the Italian for 'light/dark,' is the use of contrasts of light and shadow as a modeling technique for achieving the illusion of plasticity and three-dimensional volume in a two-dimensional drawing or painting. Leonardo's version of the technique involved varying the darkness of a color by adding black pigments rather than making it a more saturated or richer hue.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

“Vincent Peranio (Production Designer): I like the lighting. In so many vacant houses where we were filming, we're filming in a natural light or making it look like natural light because it didn't have electricity. Actually, some of the lighting to me was almost like a painting from the past, like from the seventeenth century, a Rembrandt look about it, the darkness of the house and the sunlight searing through the boarded-up windows. I think the show was bleak and beautiful in the way that looking at ruins in a ruined civilisation are.”
― Jonathan Abrams, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

“But the answer to both of those question was the same. She wasn’t doing anything to me. She was doing it to herself. Not doing it. Letting it happen. Letting it go. It wasn’t about me.

Everyone had changed since I’d returned to Paris. The sketches of the people we’d been in my memories were now shaded with levels of chiaroscuro. Everyone was more than I remembered: more complex, more complicated. More than they’d been before.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas