Summer Season

It’s almost summer, even if it’s barely spring. I’m ready. Something I find admirable about summertime art is the ability to work with starkly contrasting shadows. After all, that’s what summer is all about- Bright, blinding, beautiful sunlight.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that bright light will surely wash away all other parts of an image. So how do you keep the whole drawing visible when you also want to convey bright light?

Here’s some of the methods artists use that, together, can create darkness without dreariness, lightness with depth, and summer in all its blinding glory:

 (source)

Neva Hosking

Neva Hosking is well known for her love of rabbits, spindly leaves and emotional faces. In my own interpretation,  Neva Hosking’s signature look is an image of a red-nosed, just-cried, curly-haired gentle person. Male of female, she never fails to convey a sense of vulnerability in her sketches, but more than anything, this piece was striking to me not because of the person- but because of the leaves. They are largely missing any details at all- no veins, no crinkles, not much in the way of detail… and they look phenomenal and realistic none the less. This lack of detail is not necessarily out of simplicity or style, but more out of a recognition that in the bright light of the summer sun, our eyes can’t process the most reflective parts of nature anyway.  Neither can cameras: Have you ever noticed when you take a photo in the summer the detail kind of disappears from the photo and you’re left with 2 defined areas: Where the light hit, and where it didn’t? That’s precisely what happens in the face of summertime, and the mere act of leaving the leaves blank in this drawing immediately registers to our eyes as lighting so bright that it can’t be adjusted to visually. All without doing a thing.

Image result for woman with a parasol(source)

Claude Monet

Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol is my favorite painting of his, for a reason that ties very well into this topic- There is an undeniable sense of summer radiating from the image. Unlike the work from Neva Hosking above, Monet’s Sun is behind/to the side of the subjects, instead of right in front. That means that, while Hosking was able to show bright light through lack of detail, Monet has to use a different approach- emphasizing the details within the dark. If you can again think back to what the world looks like in bright light (it’s been a while, I know!) you surely have recognized that its easier to see the parts of the world that are in the shade. Your eyes can process the depths of darkness easier than the shine of light, and that allows for this painting to have so much detail while at the same time giving off that “summer” feeling. Choosing to paint a setting where the image is almost entirely blocking light requires one crucial thing, however: A strip of blinding, black light somewhere where the light does hit. This detail, which you’ll just about any artist does, is so important because without it there is no contrast, and contrast is what makes summer lighting… summer lighting!  Looking at the back of the woman in this painting, you can see that the outline of her dress is just white- its just a strip of white paint going the whole way down her dress. We now know that the sun is so bright in this scene that the glimpse that we get is pure sheen and nothing else.

That’s what the summer sun provides, after all. So excited to see it again!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *