The Best of Winter’s Light

Strangely, the previous post was meant to be about light, not colour. It even started out to be about light and then turned out to be about colour.

This misdirection should be a salutary lesson for any artist.

On the face of it, painting seems to be all about colour. We use tubes of the stuff, we talk about this and that pigment providing the best sort of blues or yellows, and even wax lyrical about the wonderful range of colours to be found in mud at certain times of year!

Yet in reality, certainly for anyone engaging in any kind of realist art, it is light that is far more important. It was this that I meant to write about last time, how winter light has a strangely softening effect. Summer’s light is punctuated with apparently very bright and very dark areas, whereas in winter the light and the dark areas in a landscape are much more subtly suffused into each other.

This has its problems, as some good strong light and dark contrasts are often what ‘makes’ an artwork. In compensation, winter offers different views that would be hard to make work in summer. Low sun diffused by cloud can be viewed more directly, unlike in summer, where the brightness from the inclusion of the area of sky around the sun is all too overwhelming. Another great charm of this time of year is the fantastic silhouettes of the trees, the almost black tones against those cold, but beautiful skies.

One of my favourite light/ dark contrasts, though difficult to paint, is the contrast of the warm light flowing from inside a building, creating a stark contrast with the dark world outside. What I really like about paintings which have this in, is the inviting sense of the unseen interior. Surely a composition with as strong winter associations as many other far more ‘obvious’ winter subjects.

I used to long for the sight of that warm yellow orange glow, whether it came from the hurricane lit interior of a shepherd’s van in the middle of a cold light at lambing, or from the electric light at home after a day spent hedgelaying or rick thatching with snow all around, or just trudging round feeding animals on a beastly rain-blowing-sideways sort of a day.

Even though I eternally crave being outdoors, the sense of that chance to get out of the cold and wet and sit next to the warm of the shepherd’s van stove or the fire at home was always most welcome.

Even now that I don’t find myself on those long wet days outside so much anymore, that same warm light pouring from the window, seen from the dark outside, where the chill of a winter’s night is descending as I barrow the firewood in, makes the prospect of the long dark evenings not so bad.

It seems that the human response to the connotations of light and dark might represent far more primal instincts than an artist’s dialogue would suggest.

At the moment, I’m doing a few extra drawings to illustrate my upcoming articles on ‘Painting a Spitfire’. If this means sketching quietly in the corner, making lights and darks on paper with a pencil, while the woodburner makes its cheering glow in the other corner, well you won’t catch me complaining.