Quotes & Sayings About Chiaroscuro

The limited fictions used to sell the lives of public figures often form a cloudy chiaroscuro that covers their true humanity. — William J. Mann

Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when one vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place. — Alexander McCall Smith

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro. — Peter Porter

He [the artist] ought to have 'these powerful organs of expression' - colour and chiaroscuro - entirely at his command, that he may use them in every possible form, as well as that he may do with the most perfect freedom; therefore, whether he wishes to make the subject of a joyous, solemn, or meditative character, by flinging over it the cheerful aspect which the sun bestows, by a proper disposition of shade, or by the appearances that beautify its arising or its setting, a true "General Effect" should never be lost sight of. — John Constable

All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective. — Eugene Delacroix

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece. — Okakura Kakuzo

Often, beyond the next turning, footfalls of a herd galloping across stone were heard, or further in the distance, with reassuring grunts, a wild boar could be seen, trotting with steady stride along the edge of the road with her sow and a whole procession of young in tow. And then one's heart beat faster upon advancing a little into the subtle light: one might have said that the path had suddenly become wild, thick with grass, its dark paving-slabs engulfed by nettles, blackthorn and sloe, so that it mingled up time past rather than crossing country-side, and perhaps it was going to issue forth, in the chiaroscuro of thicket smelling of moistened down and fresh grass, into one of those glades where animals spoke to men. — Julien Gracq

Book the First A MOUSE IS BORN Book the Second CHIAROSCURO Book the Third GOR! THE TALE OF MIGGERY SOW Book the Fourth RECALLED TO THE LIGHT Coda — Kate DiCamillo

The importance of colour is as nothing compared with that of form, chiaroscuro and arrangement. They are the true and enduring bases of pictorial art. — Walter J. Phillips

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity. — Emile M. Cioran

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. — Ella Leya

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We're each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We've got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time. — Libba Bray

Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite. — Joseph Roth

There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong. — Kate DiCamillo

Grandeur of effect is produced by two different ways which seem entirely opposed to each other. One is by reducing the colors to little more than chiaroscuro ... and the other, by making the colors very distinct and forcible ... but still, the presiding principle of both those manners is simplicity. — Joshua Reynolds

It was hot; heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality, a quality of living and palpitant chiaroscuro. — William Faulkner

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

The passionate reactions of people to a painting, the exclamation, 'Oh, this is wonderful,' may, even if meant in a positive way, entirely destroy the chiaroscuro, the mystical hidden weaving of fantasy which the artist needs ... — Marie-Louise Von Franz

in describing the various writers of his idolatry he more than once lets fall a phrase that could equally apply to himself. 'To read Spenser,' he says, 'is to grow in mental health.' What he values in Addison is his 'open-mindedness.' The moments of despair chronicled in Scott's diary cannot, he claims, counterpoise 'that ease and good temper, that fine masculine cheerfulness' suffused through the best of the Waverly novels. Most of all it was the chiaroscuro of what Chaucer called 'earnest' and 'game' that attracted him. He found it eminently in the poetry of Dunbar, that late-medieval Scottish maker who wrote the greatest religious poetry and the earthiest satire in the language — Jocelyn Gibb

Unlike those other painters, Brewster hadn't resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world. The faces were well-lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet. — Teju Cole

And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness - you've felt like this before, haven't you? Taken far inside. — Mark Doty

Today I'm feeling uncharacteristically chiaroscuro, and I don't know what that means for my future, or as a word. — Jarod Kintz

On westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century. — Graham Moore

To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream. — L.P. Hartley

A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity. — Joan Miro

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with ever modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still. — Hope Mirrlees

Round the cabin stood half a dozen mountain ashes, as the rowans, inimical to witches, are there called. On the worn planks of the door were nailed two horse-shoes, and over the lintel and spreading along the thatch, grew, luxuriant, patches of that ancient cure for many maladies, and prophylactic against the machinations of the evil one, the house-leek. Descending into the doorway, in the chiaroscuro of the interior, when your eye grew sufficiently accustomed to that dim light, you might discover, hanging at the head of the widow's wooden-roofed bed, her beads and a phial of holy water — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong? — Kirk Douglas

The late afternoon light came in through the curtains and made his face a study in contrasts. Chiaroscuro, she thought. The art of shadows and light. — Cassandra Clare

As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava. — Colin Thubron

In the morning, her head swimming with chiaroscuro dreams of shadows and light, she awoke in the pink room of the MacLeod House. Jason was already dressed, and stared at her from the foot of — Robert Levy

She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline artistic to mark her body, chiaroscuro designs in blood. Dying is the last thing she would want, like any healthy organism. A little pain, a small invoked sting trailing her arm, brought her much closer to grounded when she could not keep her head from racing, her thoughts from consuming her with obsession. An ounce of liquid weight loss and she could go back to being herself again. Usually. — Thomm Quackenbush

When Galileo made his astonishing discovery of mountains on the moon, his telescope didn't actually have enough magnifying power to support that finding. Instead, he recognized the zigzag pattern separating the light and dark areas of the moon. Other astronomers were looking through similar telescopes, but only Galileo "was able to appreciate the implications of the dark and light regions," Simonton notes. He had the necessary depth of experience in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing. Thanks to artistic training in a technique called chiaroscuro, which focuses on representations of light and shade, Galileo was able to detect mountains where others did not. — Adam M. Grant