Welcome…

I am not an artist.  Therefore, I feel a bit guilty using an artistic term for my blog name.  However, the blog name I wanted, roomofonesown, was taken.  I couldn’t think of anything else, so chiaroscuro it is.  I like the title.  I think, first of all, that chiaroscuro is a fun word to say and write.  Mostly, though, I like its meaning.  I didn’t know what the word meant until I was in graduate school taking a class on British Modernism.  We were reading Joseph Conrad’s book Lord Jim, and I became so fascinated with the use of shadows and light in the book that I wrote a paper on it.  Chiaroscuro became to me, then, artistic in a literary sense, which is certainly more up my alley than drawing or painting.  I discovered beautiful poetry in Conrad’s use of chiaroscuro.  His characters often spoke of glimpsing a “rent in the mist.”  They found meaning in the shadow as well as the light. 

That’s me.  I do love the light.  It’s bright, simple, easy, cheerful.  But my melancholy soul often lingers in the shadows.  Here I plumb my soul’s depth.  Here I can curl up in the silky, gray, enveloping fog and allow myself to probe through the murkiness of dark questions and equally murky answers.  As I flit through the shadows, I can do so safely, because I know that shadow is only caused by light, and if the shadows get too dark…I can always make my way back to the shadow’s source: light.  So I hope that this new blog will chronicle my journey as I weave through the yin and the yang, the shadow and the light. 

Welcome to my chiaroscuro.