Mary Oliver, in her poem “The Ponds,” says “…what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled……the light is everything.” I am increasingly drawn toward painting light in its various forms. I have a number of paintings that focus on skies: “The Happy Couple,” “Late-Day Grace,” “Thimble Peak Sunset,” “Gateway,” and “Sumac” are some of the more recent. Skies and clouds seem to me to express spirit, although light in other forms (“Softly, Softly” is an example) can depict spirit as well.

My two most recent paintings are expressions of light, each in a different way. “Mary’s Field” is a painting of a friend’s pasture at dusk.

This was a challenge to paint, because the contrast between the light in the sky and the darkness of the misty foreground, already in silhouette with the growing dusk, made photos inaccurate. Here are the reference photos:

As you can see, the first photo darkened the foreground to the point of entirely near-blackness, while the second lightened the sky to the point of washing out its beautiful colors. My solution was to borrow from each while keeping the contrast of the trees against the sky. I lowered the horizon a bit to emphasize the sky, even though this puts it near the center of the painting, which is Against The Art Rules. I also decided to emphasize the angles in the field slightly, to help lead the eye toward the sky. I added a faint scumble of lavender and peach to the foreground mist to unify the painting’s colors.

This second painting is “Portal.” My cousin Max Hinz is a photographer, and when I saw the photo of this scene I was so taken with it that I immediately asked for permission to use it for a painting.

Here I needed to do something similar, adding a bit of light and color to the near landscape, which was in almost total darkness in the photo. I used an underpainting of dark red in the shaded areas, which shows through in places, to relieve and contrast with all that green. I varied the greens, adding more light to the closest foliage in the bottom left. And I carried softer versions of the red underpainting into the tree trunks in the sunlit area and even a bit in the road.

Composition is tricky with a painting like this, since the focal point is diffuse. Of course, there is the circle created by the light. But can you see the faint slant of light starting near the top left of the road and going diagonally up from left to right in the sunlit area? This brings the viewer’s eye to the leaning trees in the upper right, which then encourage you to circle back down to the road.

I like this painting very much indeed; it seems to me to say something not only about light in the visual sense but also about being drawn toward increasing the light in one’s life. May we all be pulled toward such an increase!