Dawn in Brooklyn, Light and Dark

I love the early-morning view from our porch in Brooklyn. There are big Victorian houses round about, and tall, graceful, trees. The combination of warm, glowing house lights with the wide, cooler spreading light of the dawn is magnificent, and at this time of year the air is alive with the songs of birds. This is what I saw the other morning, around 6:30 am:

Dawn in Brooklyn

In "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?", fifteen questions about beauty published in 1955 for the opening of New York City's Terrain Gallery, Eli Siegel asked, about light and dark:

Does all art present the world as visible, luminous, going forth?—does art, too, present the world as dark, hidden, having a meaning which seems to be beyond ordinary perception?—and is the technical problem of light and dark in painting related to the reality question of the luminous and hidden?

It is the opposites of light and dark in particular that affect me so much as I sit on the porch; also continuity and change, and point and width. The house lights are pointed and narrow compared to the growing light over the horizon. At this early time of day one is aware that the darkness, though powerful, is retreating before the sunrise. What is hidden is becoming more known. 

Visually, dark and light add to each other. Both are needed for the beauty to be felt. They are an inspiration to me to want to see more, and to value both brightness and darkness truly, what is shown and what is hidden, accurately, in the world and myself.   

Dawn in Brooklyn II

Antiracism blog: https://cjbalchin.blogspot.com/