Is it a dark era? It’s certainly a dark time of the year, & that’s okay

Each city has one unique light, and light is much more than an atmospheric device propelling our perception, mood, and aesthetics. With light, darkness helps reveal form, focus, and meaning.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein had some interesting comments on the parallelism between the subjective perception of light by American and Spanish artists, which was something I had thought sometimes before reading that reference when contrasting some paintings by John Singer Sargent (say, El Jaleo or Capri Girl) with those of J…