It comes upon us by surprise and leaves us as quick as it arrived. Short-lived but for some reason brings smiles to our faces. The colours emitted, probably more awesome than what our eyes truly perceive, paint the muddy puddles and dirty glass. It rains, the sun peeps out and a mist of colour emerges as the sun beams refract its light on the final droplets of rain. How would you feel waking up to a rainbow? Or having colours streaming over your face rather than a white light? Would it agitate you? Would you see life differently? "... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?"-Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, 1976
Light vs. Object, prisms and water play a huge role in how light is transformed/refracted and this is my interest at the moment. The movement of the angle as it closes near to the refractive point where white light disperses into a spectrum of colour that brings the question, what colour is light?
[Rainbows are happy endings to rainy days]
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