Parasoleil - The Art of Shade

Notes from the owner's desk

June, 2009

Essay on the artistic principle of Parasoleil panels

A tree is beautiful for the space between its branches and leaves. Only a tree separated from its surroundings can be seen as worthy attention for the eye. Is not a tree’s glory hidden within a forest or overgrown jungle? Is not the ocean most beautiful as it meets its end at the shore? The mountains, themselves, are their most foreboding as their peaks reach the sky, and yet, it is by this devastating brunt of rock that we are called to overcome their form. No peak is without a valley to its neighbor. The oasis of the desert may be single tree, the oasis of a forest – the absence of the same. To the space between is what we are always drawn. All the world, even the great masses of planets swirling around in nothingness, echo the nature of space. A migration of birds flying south across the Kansas plain or the thousands of wildebeest passing rural villages by the Great Rift Valley only prove our curiosity of space – the space around, the space between, the space that once was. We long for the oasis, the space from what we know – from what is common and routine - relief from concentrated material. Yet, a restful clearing in the jungle is itself a desert without the experience of dense canopy of trees and suffocating vines through which we search. Although we are often drawn to the shadow - the alternative - the counter-experience, the shadow cannot exist without the light. Is beauty only found in what does not exist, in distance, in the question, in not fully knowing, in space?