The season of mist and mellow fruitfulness is upon us.
Let’s talk about the color of light.
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Boys on the Beach, Joaquín Sorolla, 1908. There is
warm light with cool shadows, but there’s also a strong warm reflection from
the sand on which the figures are resting.
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What we call “light” is really the narrow band of
electromagnetic waves that our retinas can perceive. This narrow band is
comprised of the colors of the rainbow, or what we sometimes call ROY G BIV.
(There really isn't an indigo; it's there so that Roy has a pronounceable
surname.) Each of Roy's color names corresponds to a specific wavelength. For
example, blue is about 475 nm; red is about 650 nm.
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Valencian Fishwives, Joaquín Sorolla, 1903. Here the
light is cool and the shadows are warmer.
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When the whole visible
light spectrum strikes your eye at the same time, you perceive white. This is
not a color in itself, but the admixture of a bunch of colors. In the real
world, this is never a pure mix. The atmosphere bends light just like a prism
does, so what you see is always tinted. The light might be gold and peach at
sunset and blue at midday. Impurities in the atmosphere also give us the
energetic indigo-violet of the far distant hills—the farther away something is,
the more likely dust has filtered out the higher wavelengths (the warm colors).
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Return from Fishing, Joaquín Sorolla, 1894. The
light is warm, the shadows are cool, and the places where the light is going
through the sails are warmer still, since they’re filtered by the off-white
fabric.
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Just as all the colors together form white light, the
absence of light is total blackness. But unless you’re in a cave or darkroom,
that’s a theoretical construct. There’s always reflected light bouncing around
in the shadows, and that light gives the shadows its color. It’s never black
and it’s unlikely to be grey, either.
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Looking for Shellfish, Joaquín Sorolla, 1905. A warm
light comes from our side of the figure, but there are warm shadows—the result
of local color reflection from the rock. Likewise the bottom half of the torso
reflects strong cool tones from the water and anchors the boy into the sea.
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If the color of the light is essentially warm, the color of
the shadows is almost always going to be cool, and vice-versa. Knowing this and
identifying the color of the light and shadow is the first step to a good
landscape painting.
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Catalonia: the Tuna Catch, from Visions of Spain,
Joaquín Sorolla, 1919. In this case, most of the painting is in shadow, and
what light there is, is filtered through the yellow awning. It is the
distortion of the light-dark color scheme that tells us viewers that we are in
an enclosed space.
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The exception to this is an object in filtered light. Its
shadows and lighter passages will be variations of the same color temperature.
This is how we instinctively know that something we’re seeing is under an
awning, for example.
Study the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla
to understand the color of light. He was a master at painting white fabric in a
variety of circumstances, and comparing the light passages to the shadow
passages will tell you much about managing the color of light in your painting.
This post was originally published in 2015. Let me know
if you’re interested in painting with me aboard the
schooner American Eagle in late September.
