Landscape painters learn to “paint the light, not the objects.” The light glancing off trees, fields, and water creates a beautiful and ever-changing scene in nature. Autumn light with its slant angle and long afternoons has been particularly beautiful at Little Piney this season. Here are some of the photo highlights of the fall/winter landscape along with quotations from famous artists about painting light.
“Always lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in Nature! For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow. ” –Francisco de Goya
“Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows. “–Claude Monet
“The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.”
–Leonardo da Vinci
“A gray day provides the best light.” –Leonardo da Vinci
“The substance of painting is light.” – Andre Derain
“The picture must radiate light, the bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from outside.”–Egon Schiele
“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”–Claude Monet
“Paint your picture by means of the lights. Lights define texture and color – shadows define form.”–Howard Pyle
“As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter’s imagination.” –James Abbot McNeill Whistler
“You have the sky overhead giving one light; then the reflected light from whatever reflects; then the direct light of the sun; so that, in the blending and suffusing of these several luminations, there is no such thing as a line to be seen anywhere.”– Winslow Homer
“In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.” – Hans Hofmann
A Little Film–