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Light Butterfly

© Joe Jeskiewicz

Light last week, light this week, maybe If I continue to talk light I can lose a few pounds. I have become inundated with caterpillars and butterflies this year. Large Yellow and Black and Orange and Gold butterflies can be seen around my yard. Once I saw 5 playing near my front door. Of course one of my dogs uses it keen sense of sight to track the flying insects and snap repeatedly at the air, but they are too fast for her.

While I am very excited to see the butterflies from a distance I love to look at them up close. I do not wish to get one of those butterfly nets and go a huntin'. I'd rather sneak up on them and just get a good look. Unfortunately for me they prefer my wife. One even landed on her chest while she was walking to the car. I think perhaps it was the perfume. And yet the flies and mosquitoes hang around me (no comments).

While looking at the butterflies fluttering joyfully in the shafts of sunlight poking through the trees I wondered if it were possible to combine light and butterflies in a unique manner. I'm sure there are many ways outside of what I just described and so I set my mind to work. Nothing, nothing, nothing, aha! Why not make a butterfly out of light. I don't necessarily mean a holographic projection but rather a silhouette of a butterfly with light.

When you combine several sources of light of various colors the points where they overlap becomes whiter and whiter in contrast to pigment which only become darker or murkier. The idea would be to have a dark room and with a theoretical hundred spotlight of various hues begin to shine them one by one onto a surface so that their colored circles would overlap in such a way to produce a small piece of the butterfly. Arcs and circles and overlapping colors around the exterior of the shape define the overlapped area gestaltly in our mind to resemble a butterfly.

I started this project using pigment in a paint program just clicking colors and several spots around what I felt should be a butterfly wing shape. I continued to add colors under certain areas of the picture because murkier with pigment and while I continued to add colors the original idea faded and the haziness of form was the only thing that resembled a butterfly. I figured with the path that I chose other ideas were needed to reinforce the idea that I wanted to present, which was simply a butterfly.

ButterFlies

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