Chiaroscuro (English pronunciation: /kiˌɑːrəˈskjʊəroʊ/; Italian: [kjarosˈkuːro]; Italian for light-dark) in art is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. Chiaroscuro is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for using contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects such as the human body. Some examples are included below:
Grace Forster
With this piece, I would like to portray the human paradox of seeing versus believing. This is a critical element in the human experience because it encompasses both the physical and spiritual constituents of what it is to be human. On one hand, there is a very physical part to us: our bodies. They are the portions that we can see and experience with our five senses. Yet, there’s another part to us that’s fundamentally invisible to our five basic senses, yet very prominent in our lives: our personalities, thoughts, and feelings. These are the characteristics that, in my opinion, truly define what it is to be human. Lots of other organisms have a physical being, but none has the mental capacity to include so many facets of personality. Going off of this idea, humans have used this mental capacity to wonder about their origins for centuries. We’ve come up with various religions, scientific theories, and practices to explain life on earth, and while no one idea has been proven correct, we often still believe adamantly in our explanation of choice. For example, being Catholic, though no God has ever revealed himself to me in the flesh, I do believe that He exists. In my drawing I plan to further explore this point by including how humans use artifacts, like the pictographs on the walls of Ancient Egyptian Tombs, to infer what the humans who came before us were like. These pictographs, for instance, provide us with an idea of what life in Ancient Egypt was like, but no one knows for sure. So, essentially this drawing should delve into the paradox of human physicality and human thoughts and beliefs.
