Glory In Popular Art
Comments By Stone Riley
© Stone Riley 2012,
offered in connection with Riley's painting "Drone Strike In North Waziristan".
Riley's painting:  Here
Riley's main website:  Here

This page is under development, but here is a proposed draft for the first few paragraphs of the essay:

Glory is visible in human eyes.  Its color is the sheen of polished metal seen in rainbow light, perhaps.

Of course there are many other similar disturbances in our visual field.  Fear casts its shadow, joy shines its light and anger pools in red; metaphorically and in our actual perception too.  And these effects on our vision screen (to use a metaphor) are not only projected from inside our brain; they are also sensory inputs from the world around, for our visual perception system sees much more than the world's solid stuff and presents it in this way.  Yes, we can sometimes see glory.

Of course, "glory" is a complicated and ambiguous thing.  What do we think it is?  And how do we try to show it to each other in popular art?