Pop quiz: What are the two most important tools of a lighting designer?
If you said Starbucks or the Internet, maybe you should consider a career in audio. If you said light and dark—congratulations, you just might have a future in this business.
As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail. Some lighting designers use light as a hammer, forcefully applying it to every “nail” they see. What we often neglect to recognize is that we have a lot of tools at our disposal, including the dark. And nothing can better emphasize the light better than the dark.
A great example was a Prince show, two years ago, that was lit by Peter Morse. Morse clearly gets it. His use of light and dark is phenomenal, and given the chance, he will use it to great advantage. In this case he was given the chance because “his purple badness” kept the video crew in check and asked Morse to use as much dark as he used light. And Morse pulled it off like a modern-day Rembrandt
– From Richard Cadena’s upcoming Focus On Design column.
