Drawing and Painting: All About the Light
Oct 29, 2008
To me, the most important thing about learning and advancing in painting or drawing is learning how to see. By that I mean seeing and understanding exactly the way in which something is defined as a physical object by reflected light (which is what makes it visible to us in the first place). Most people look at a bridge and see a bridge, all the parts and visual information filtered out by the brain so that it appears as a simplified single unit, a noun: bridge. Anyone can draw a bridge, you can outline all the shapes and parts that fit together, and it will look like a bridge. But this is focusing on the physical properties of the object itself, instead of the light that it reflects and absorbs.
Look at how the light interacts with the series of surfaces that define the object, not the outlines of its parts. Does it reflect it directly, partially, does it glow with refracted light, and at what angle is all this happening, in relation to the light source(s), and the angles of the forms around it? Observations like this make it make it much easier to feel exactly what is going on, to break it down, so that your mind can process and then translate it onto a 2-dimensional plane. It’s all about the light, where it’s coming from and where it’s going. Many times, when someone first sees one of my drawings or paintings, they will say something along the lines of “I could never do that.” I always disagree, and try to convince them otherwise, because anyone can learn to see light and dark in a way that makes sense to them. Technical ability (there are a lot of painters with very little technical ability, but a fantastic ability to understand light and how to use it) whether you are born with it or not, can be fine tuned, and, like anything else, will benefit from practice. From that point, it’s just a matter of editing your work, fixing things that look wrong to try to make them look right.
It’s a slightly different way to look at the world. This is why I love shadows.