(embellishing on my notes from READING DRAWINGS- Professor Stephen Farthing)
Authorship - can we consider the author of a plane's shadow to be the pilot?
If the shadow has no author can we even consider it a drawing?
If the shadow has no author can we even consider it a drawing?
Often in art, though less so in ordinary acts of seeing, there is a difference between shadow in general and shadows in particular. A strong or precisely-directed light source casts shadows which closely resemble a cross section of an object placed in its path. The process is itself a kind of representation. Both Pliny the Elder and Quintilian cited the outlining of a shadow as a primal artistic act ... Pliny tells how the Corinthian Maid, daughter of the potter Butades, drew around her lover's silhouette on a wall to remember him before he went abroad; for Quintilian it was a shepherd tracing his shadow on the ground with a stick. Both parables locate the origins of drawing in a kind of state of nature: domestic intimacy and romantic attachment in the former case, Arcadian pastoral in the latter. Both also feed off the transience of the shadow, its power to suggest absence as well as presence. Tomorrow his mapped shadow will be all the Maid has to remind her of her boyfriend, and the shepherd's scratched image will surely have blown away.
from The Emblem of Early Vanities, Keith Miller on Shadows
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