LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND SHADOWS.

LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND SHADOWS. I posted here on how flatness has been valued in art since around the 1920’s, with depth and a sense of space being less valued. In this way, contemporary art has returned to what babies and the previously blind see. One patient described by Annie Dillard asked about paintings and photographs, “Why do they put those dark marks all over them?” Her mother explained that these dark marks were shadows and that without shadows, things would look flat. The girl answered: “Well, that’s how things do look….Everything looks flat with dark patches.” Annie Dillard says that the newly sighted have a lot of trouble making sense of space and the solidity of objects. You could think of the dark marks in paintings and photographs as helping the eye and the mind to understand the depth of the world.