Lake Monticello Cove

9" x 12" oil on Canvasboard

I painted this study overlooking a back cove of Lake Monticello near my home.  I used my usual pallette of Ultramarine Blue, Cad. Yellow Light, Cad. Red Light, Yellow Ochre, a touch of Burnt Sienna, and Tit. White.  It was a calm, peaceful day with hardly a cloud in the sky.  Even so, there was enough color reflected in the water to make this a bit of a challenge yet fun.

Preserving Places

Great landscape paintings are hardly just representations of a place.  In fact, the truly best are representations by genre only.  Landscapes are windows by which we measure our own human experience, reminders of time spent and time remaining.  They kindly become whatever we want them to be—a childhood memory of walking in the forest, hills outside a grandfather’s farm, the first rays of the morning sun coming up over the stillness of a lake, mountaintops capped with the first signs of snow.  They are reminders of when others who are gone were still among us living and breathing.  This is, the cycle that landscape painting doesn’t just remind us of, but connects us to and helps solidify our place.

Landscape painting is just as important today as it was 200 years ago.  The need for artists to understand and interpret our environment is something that will never change.  While artists sometimes fret over having to drive further and further out to find the last pristine places to capture, we are happy they can still find them.  Even if we’re not among the privileged few who experience them firsthand, we are happy in the assurance of their existence.  Finding these places is only half of it, however.  Today’s landscape artists are also documenting them for posterity, preserving these last great places for future generations.

Whether a grand place or small, there is beauty found at every turn and direction.  Today’s top landscape artists capture this beauty in a variety of mediums and styles, and they provide glimpses into our memories and experiences.  Ultimately the ability to make us connect to these memories and experiences of land makes a landscape painting great.”

“You’ve got a 12 by 16 inch or canvases not much bigger than a window, but you have vast surroundings you have to focus down on.  You have to get the location, lighting and shadows right and get the essence of the moment down very quickly, especially when the scene includes people.”  Darrell Hill

“I continue to be amazed at the complex simplicity found in nature.  Before I knew anything about color harmony, balance, texture, shape, value or composition, I knew that the sight of a sunset or the interesting shape of a billowing storm cloud brought undeniable emotion to my heart."  Michael Bingham

“I feel the landscape, either as the focal point or backdrop, has been the most harmonious element in my work throughout the years.  It’s an endless network of pattern, design, and color, but most importantly it’s an integrated aspect of the human experience.  We all find a personal connection to the landscape as it relates to us individually.” Joseph Alleman

“My mission, as a painter, is to effectively apply colors in a beautiful combination to transmit the many moods of nature.”  Carole Gray-Weihman

“I look for the overlapping patterns in nature for my subjects.  Often these are more sensed than seen—it takes careful observation of the nuanced colors and the multitude of details to discover the inherent composition in a landscape.  Once these patterns reveal themselves, I interpret them with oil paint.  It begins with the careful choosing and mixing of colors while being sensitive to values and color temperatures…My satisfaction with a painting comes from how well the distillation of the information I saw in a scene comes together to capture the mood.”

From  “Preserving Places”, American Art Collector, #71, September 2011

Looking for the ideal lighting situation in the Artist Studio?

Can you do better than north light?

 

“We artists think of reds as warm and blues as cool, but this has more to do with our collective experience with flames (that burn) and ice (that chills) and not so much with light temperature. North light from a clear sky is even hotter and bluer than direct sunlight—around 7500K.

The color of a light source is measured in degrees Kelvin. For example, the 100-watt bulb in the lamp on your nightstand emits a yellowish light with a color temperature around 2500K. A photographer’s 250-watt photoflood emits a bluer light with a color temperature around 3200K. Even daylight has a color temperature, and it’s even bluer, and therefore hotter.

 

What does all this mean for the artist looking for the ideal lighting situation? North light will throw a bluish light upon the palette, making pigments look cooler than they are. (Remember our collective experience mentioned above—bluer looks cooler.) North light accentuates blues and subdues greens and reds. To warm things up, the artist may overcompensate. If one of his paintings ends up in someone’s dining room lit with 100-watt incandescent bulbs, the paintings will look warmer than the artist intended. By the same token, if the artist paints under too yellow a light, he may overcompensate in the other direction, and paint with too cool a palette. Put this painting in that same dining room, and the piece will look cold and uninviting.

The ideal color temperature for light is somewhere between warm and cool.

Experts say that 5000K lighting (also called D50 lighting and a standard in the industry) has an even amount of all colors in it. It’s used in the printing industry for viewing press sheets, since printed images have many colors to be evaluated. Of course, most homes don’t have D50; most have yellow (cool) incandescent lighting or blue (warm) fluorescent lighting. If you don’t have D50 lighting, try at least to paint under a mix of cool and warm light. And then, try to view your paintings in a variety of lighting situations to find problems and to see how they’ll look to a patron or on a client’s walls.”

Lighting suppliers

The following companies make “full-spectrum” lighting suitable for art studios. Some offer only fluorescent lamps, while others also offer incandescent lamps.

Most make lights in the “averaged daylight” color temperature of around 5000K, but some go up to 7500K. Call or visit their websites for full details on products.

 

Ott-Lite TrueColor Lighting—“natural sunlight” via fluorescent

800/842-8848
www.ottlite.com

Verilux Natural Spectrum—can switch between different wattages, “full spectrum,”

both fluorescent and incandescent

888/544-4865
www.verilux.net

Ultralux—Ultralux and BlueMax—dimmable “full-spectrum” fluorescent
888/845-6597
www.ultraluxlamps.com, www.bluemaxlighting.com

Vita-Lite, Optima, Color Matching, Daylight 65—fluorescent

1-800-289-3876
 www.duro-test.com

Chromalux, Lumachrome—incandescent and fluorescent

800/354-1044
www.lumiram.com

From “Everything Is Illuminated”  By Michael Chesley Johnson, The Artist’s Magazine, October 2007 issue