Dawn out here, when it came, was a luminous sunrise that silhouetted the obtuse shrubs and the stupid stick trees with their stupid now obvious sticks, while behind me a picture-book full moon slid through the clouds preparing to tuck itself behind the huge outcrop over the way.
But they are also fairly static and flat in comparison to the oils, in which the luminous calligraphic brushstrokes are silhouetted against a pale gesso ground.
For much of the excerpt she appeared in silhouette against a luminous panel (Chien-Chang Lee did the lighting), her limbs becoming almost creaturely as they snaked and lashed about the table, accompanied by jazzy, throbbing music.
The effect is breathtaking at the outset, as the four dancers (Nicholas Strafaccia, Laurel Tentindo, Samuel von Wentz and Tamara Riewe) are revealed silhouetted against the luminous haze.
The marvel of it lies in a tonal modulation of strong color: a luminous blue, white-clouded sky silhouettes the boat and its figures, whose shadowed hues smolder.
Luminous gradations of skylight, spiky silhouettes, humour, menace and challenge – everything is there, from the hugeness of Hagrid to the horrified expressions of untrusting new wizard chessmen.
And as the sailing ducks turned to silhouettes against the luminous water, as the Pantheon receded into the darkness of the hills and the night's first bats began careering across the darkening sky, the garden's historical associations seemed to melt away.
These works make you wonder if Bush is familiar with Jasper Johns's "Seasons," where each of the four paintings is shadowed by a male, seemingly unclothed silhouette, or Pierre Bonnard's strangely chaste, luminous paintings of his wife reclining in a bathtub.
One of his best-known pictures, "Colorado Springs, Colorado" (1968), is a straight-ahead shot of an ordinary ranch house whose front window frames the silhouette of a woman backlit by a luminous rear window.
After experimenting with semi-Pointillist Impressionism in Paris, he painted, upon learning of his father's death, "Night in St .Cloud" (1890), which shows a top-hatted man in silhouette, sitting at a window and smoking, in variously inky and luminous blues.
