Painters of Light

Who are my favorite painters? my favorite artists from history, alive or dead, mortal and immortal?

One group of favorites are those painters who worked directly with light. Those who portrayed natural light with remarkable clarity. Those whose subject, no matter what else going on in the painting, was light itself. Perhaps this is a photographer's bias, and I have always been fascinated with light. A lot of my own favorite photographs are of light, and the sky, no matter what else is going on in the photograph.


Jan Vermeer

The subtleties of Vermeer's lighting, the soft gray light typical of The Netherlands in northern Europe, is what I love about these paintings. Vermeer is all about the subtleties of light, the delicate shading of indirect light on subjects, the tones of natural indirect light, the illumination of the spirit within the person reflected by the illumination of their surroundings. Many of Vermeer's surviving paintings are of women performing tasks of the everyday; but in the paintings, the everyday takes on spiritual significance. The moments are only apparently random moments during the day. What the paintings capture, and the lighting both subsumes and supports, are quiet moments of inwardness in otherwise ordinary, eventful lives. Moments of contemplation and perfect attention. Moments wherein the smallest action, the tiniest detail, takes on the significance of the the Divine.


Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was the master of chiaroscuro, the qualities of shadow and darkness in painting. His style was innovative and controversial during this lifetime, and was influential on generations of painters after. He also painted ordinary people as models for sacred subjects, bringing the sacred down to the secular level; this was sometimes considered blasphemous, but ushered in a level of realism in painting that again was highly influential. Caravaggio's use of shadow, in which his canvases are often more dark than light, serves to focus the attention on the characters. Caravaggio's life and personality were tempestuous; the moods in his paintings are often dark moments that had traditionally been painted brighter by previous generations of painters; the point is that Caravaggio carried the dramatic moments of life into his art. His people are ordinary, sometimes with unbecoming dirt on their feet and clothes, and the dimly-lit interiors in which they appear only suggest or hint at the significance of the moment being painted.

It's interesting to me to contrast Caravaggio with Vermeer: the brightly-lit paintings of Vermeer were painted in a cold, dark climate, while Caravaggio's darknesses were all painted in sun-drenched Mediterranean cities. The opposition of light and shadow is intriguing, and the reversals of what one might naturally presume the environment of each painter would reflect or enhance.


John Singer Sargent

I've written about Sargent before, in appreciation. This time I just want to point out how his figures, even in the formal portraits for which he was best-known, seem to glow from within. The lighting in Sargent always has a personality of its own, and whether the figures are bathed in the indirect reflections of bright sunlight, or the softer skylight shades of twilight, the illumination brings out the inner self. The light is not of surface only, but comes from within. Sargent was often thought of as a superficial painter: superficial in the technical sense, an artist of surfaces and appearances. What's intriguing to me is the depths of character he conveys in the subjects of even his most formal and comely posed portraits. Here there's a shadow lurking in the eyes; there, an actual shadow subtly darkens a face, turning the meaning more inward than might be expected in a formal portrait.


Georgia O'Keeffe

With O'Keeffe we also approach shape and form as inspiration, and as energetic reality. (I'll be looking at another group of painters from this approach as well, later.) The exhibition of her work that I saw last fall in Minneapolis, themed Circling Around Abstraction, was remarkable in that it pointed out how her forms often returned to the edge of abstraction throughout her career. She was never far away from circular and spiral forms, and the energy they gave her paintings is transcendent.

What I notice as I re-read through the exhibition catalog book (which I recommend highly) is how often this work approaches the darkness of the void and simultaneously the sublime brightness of the sky. Light and dark swirl around each other continuously, each birthing itself from within the other. The truth is, O'Keeffe's lighting never holds still. It sometimes approaches the sublime, as in some of the desert-bone paintings wherein the lighting is often coming from multiple directions, confusing the figure-ground orientation. Illumination in the harsh desert sunlight was both easy for O'Keeffe to represent, and also very difficult to convey with meaning and accuracy. These are not photos, these contain more information than a desert-light-overexposed photo ever could.

John Singer Sargent: An appreciation

John Singer Sargent, "In the Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight," 1879

This is a favorite painting of mine. It is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. I have spent hours standing and sitting in front of it, looking at its details and layers. It is a post-Impressionist landscape painting, albeit a relatively realistic one, by a painter best known for his portraits. What's remarkable about this painting is that, if you look closely, Sargent has painted most of the walking and standing figures as though they were in motion; in some cases, they are blurred as if they were time-exposures on a photograph. This tends to heighten the feeling of depth-of-field, but also emphasizes the low light conditions under which such a photograph would have had to have been taken. I have seen many actual sunsets with just this perfect translucent gray-pink light in the sky, but almost no other paintings I have seen evoke it so perfectly. This painting is a different kind of realism: it has more to do with low-light photography than it does with photo-realism, and although it depicts a moment captured in time, it does so in the way a photographer might, rather than a realistic painter from an era earlier than Sargent's.

I also am reminded of an insight from José Argüelles' book The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression (1974). Argüelles spends a whole chapter in this book giving a convincing argument that the early history of photography influenced Impressionist painting. Certainly most of the Impressionist painters were familiar with photography, if only as a pasttime that was gaining popularity in cultured circles. One or two of these artists did make photographs. Photography, in its early years, was limited by its materials to long exposures: slow emulsions meant long exposure times. Thus, many early images show urban landscapes with blurred people, moving too fast for the slow emulsions.

This motion-blur is almost exactly like what Sargent is depicting in this painting, with some people standing still for longer periods of time, while others are moving and thus have blur, and in one case almost a double-exposure. I've looked closely at Sargent's brushwork, and in some cases, the moving figures as translucent yet precisely shown, on one edge of the blur, with the other edge of teh blur feathering out to a soft edge, exactly the way they would be in a long exposure taken under low-light conditions. This is truly remarkable, and I know of almost no other painted example of this photographic observation.

Now, here's a photo of mine:



I took this photo from Artist's Point, on the outer edge of the harbor at Grand Marais, MN, on the northern shore of Lake Superior, in 2001 or so. The photo was taking facing west, with the afternoon sun in a sky full of stacked cumulus clouds, with sunlight scattering on the shallow waves in the foreground. The Sawtooth Mountains fade into the haze, in the distance.

Whenever I look at this photograph, I think of Sargent's painting. I see his painted figures in the similar vertical shapes of the standing and walking figures on the causeway leading out to the harbor lighthouse. The shapes of the people are recognizable, but elongated and stick-like, reminiscent of some of Sargent's moving figures in the evening light. Although my photo was taken in the afternoon, I feel a strong connection between this photo, and Sargent's twilit garden.

So, photography influences painting, which influences photography, bringing the artistic process of visual representation full circle.

Sargent was an artist who genuinely looked deep into the reality of things, and was able to depict what he saw. He saw what was really going on, and his observations are insightful and accurate. I think this is one reason his portraits were prized: he actually saw into the personalities of the people he was painting. He depicted them as they are, with insight and empathy. This is what made him not just a good painter, but a great one.