Title: Coffee Cups and Baby Shoes
Artist: Dan Dwayne Spencer
Media: White Pencil on Black Paper
This is one of my drawings that I used as a class example when I was a fine arts teacher. It is created by drawing with a white pencil. I'm sure you're saying 'so what'? However, there's a trick to drawing with a white pencil. If you draw normally everything you've drawn looks like an x-ray from the doctor's office. That is because it is in reverse. The shadow becomes white and the whites look dark. For those of you who are old enough to remember film negatives... This will remind you exactly of a film negative. To make the picture look normal the artist must look for the light areas - not the shadow area. It is a different way of thinking. The artist is literally drawing the light. The themes of light verses darkness and good verses evil are ancient. They exist everywhere in literature from Mary Shelly's 'Frankenstein' to Mark Twain's 'Tom Sawyer.' Every book must have some sort of protagonist and antagonist to carry the plot. Granted sometimes the line between the two become blurred and you're not sure which is which... but if you look hard enough by the end of the story the author will make his/her point clear. The most practiced people in hiding there true self are spies. Spies are notorious for disguising who they really are... their light or their darkness become completely blurred. The spy in my short story '421 Sierra Glen Drive' who killed the poor lady was exactly that way. If you remember Mrs. Crawford and her daughter found the dead body when they were house hunting. It was a shock to everyone.
Find out more by reading my book "Spies Lie & Spies Die."
