The Sower

The statue above, located in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, is evidently a man sowing what must be seeds of one kind or another. We do not know what the crop is and there’s no practical way of showing the seed grains flying out from his hand, but nonetheless it’s clear what his activity is. Now if we go on to focus on the wall behind the statue, there appears to be an array of stars drawn on it, which fan out as they get closer to the ground. As things stand, it’s not clear what this is all about. At first sight, one might take it to be some form of graffiti defacing the wall, the handiwork of a disrespectful and inconsiderate youth who wants to leave his mark on the urban environment, an all too common feature of our undisciplined modern society. But is it really graffiti? Is it just the unrestrained daubing of a mischievous individual? The second photo below reveals all.

This is the same statue, the same sower of seeds, in the selfsame place, but now we see the scene at night, and all is suddenly revealed to our astonished gaze. What seemed to be mindless graffiti on the wall behind the statue is now seen for what it is, and we cannot help but marvel at the ingenuity of it all. Thanks to a clever positioning of the lighting, a shadow of the sower is projected onto the backdrop of the wall and we now see what is being sown - not crop seed at all, but a constellation of stars that sprays out from the right hand of the sower as it is scattered on the ground. The sower of seeds is in reality a sower of... stars! And by analogy perhaps a sower of dreams. And how apt that this should be seen at night, for it is then that dreams populate our sleep and transport us to a world of mystery and magic.

This transformation may also be regarded as an allegory: that things are not always what they seem and that seen in a different light or from a different perspective their true nature reveals itself. For those of us who are all too ready to jump to conclusions, it is a salutary reminder of the risk we run in prejudging what at first appears to be obvious.