The phrase "a play of light" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe the way light interacts with objects, creating visual effects or patterns, often in artistic or poetic contexts.
Example: "The artist captured the essence of the sunset beautifully, showcasing a play of light that danced across the canvas."
Alternatives: "a dance of light" or "a display of light".
A face becomes a play of light and shadow, and not merely an arbitrary one.
The orchestral writing is often little more — or nothing less — than a play of light around the voices.
Shafts of humour and farce pierce the darkness; sudden glimpses of beauty – in a friendship, a landscape, a play of light – illuminate a moment.
The exterior is clad in redwood slats, left, creating a play of light and shadow that reinforces a sense of privacy.
Mr. Simons used panels of draped fringe against dark wool crepe, so that it seemed less an adornment than a form of transparency, a play of light.
A characteristic swiftly modulating brush defines the figure, and light cast from an unseen source, perhaps lightning, allows for a play of light and shadow over the figure to model a sense of body volume.
During stretches of the work, while a play of lights in the rafters of the 80-foot-high hall caught your attention, the white cloaks made the people in the darkened floor area blend into the lunar atmosphere.
And I doubt that anyone failed to recall Mr. Robertson's just-related anecdote about Mr. Boulez's delight at a play of lights and clouds viewed from an airplane window as the flutists Robert Langevin, Mindy Kaufman and Alexandra Sopp fluttered and soared in electronically enhanced reveries.
Fluid but arbitrarily irregular surfaces augment the emotional content by providing a play of sparkling light that suggests vitality.
One picture, again titled Nude, 1936, shows long limbs entwined in a yogic pose, a play of bright light and black shade in lines silhouetting the arms extended about the knees like a wreath.
In the nineteen-seventies, the cognitive psychologist David Marr formalized the idea that, in effect, we see the real world first as a series of life drawings, as a shaded play of light falling on the world what Marr called, half jokingly, a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch," a field of cells that represents information about a surface or an edge.
