Clare Bucknell's review of the Wright of Derby exhibition beautifully captures the tension between light and shadow.
In my review I add: 'Wright’s paintings ... are pregnant with childish fancy; his manipulation of light embraces our joy in and fear of the unknown.'
The silence of light and shadow dulls the chatter of Wright’s subjects, immobilising squabbling children and gesticulating lecturers into quiet, almost spectral forms.
‘Joseph Wright of Derby’s contemporary viewers associated his night pieces with a kind of sublime unclarity, a glare or glitter that obscured as much as it illuminated.’
Clare Bucknell on the artist’s nocturne paintings.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Like darkness, light at its most powerful could disorientate, overpower, blind the senses. Joseph Wright of Derby’s...
