If achieving harmony or capturing a mood or the color of the light was simply a matter of matching colors, then landscape painters would only need to cultivate one skill: mixing and matching colors exactly as they see them. Yet any painter who has ever attempted to translate the effects of light into paint has had to come to terms with the fact that this is not entirely possible. Why? Pigments are incapable of expressing the range of value and luminosity of natural light.

No matter how brilliant we make our colors or how strongly we render our value contrasts, a painting can never compete with the brilliance of sunlight.

To compensate for this disparity, painters manipulate value and color in exceedingly clever ways. So clever, in fact, they can produce color relationships that, although never matching the luminosity of natural light, can evoke the same sensations. If any of the great painters of light—J.M.W. Turner, the Impressionists, or the Hudson River painters, to name a few—were able to convince us that their light was “true,” then that is a testament to how clever and skillful their use of color was.

As we will see in the next chapter, the primary vehicle for this “cleverness” is the color strategy. What particular colors, interacting in what particular ways, can produce the effects we are after?

When I was in art school, one of my first landscape assignments was to paint the view out the studio window. I recall my struggle to match the color of the afternoon light that slanted across the grounds. No matter how many mixtures I tried, the color didn’t seem right. When my instructor came over, he looked out the window, looked at my painting, and said, “Try adding some orange to the light areas . . . and make them a little darker.” The color I saw outside didn’t appear very orange or very dark to me. But I applied this new color anyway and much to my surprise, it worked better than any of my previous attempts. Even more surprising was that this better color was not the color I saw when I looked out the window.

Here was a paradox: a particular color, in the context of my painting, could make a more effective statement about the color of the light than when I tried to paint it exactly as I saw it.

That experience awakened me to a fundamental precept that would forever surround my efforts to paint the effects of natural light. A successful color strategy is not based solely on direct observation; that is, the colors we see in nature. It is also based on informed modification, the necessary changes we make to values and colors to achieve the desired results. The “right” color is a fluid blend between observation and interpretation.

How much does one rely on direct observation? On informed modification? It varies depending on whether we are painting outdoors or in the studio.

PLEIN AIR: DIRECT OBSERVATION

When we paint outdoors, nothing stands between us and the subject but the air. We can see nuances of color and value that a photo could never record. We are engaged in an intense conversation with nature, observing what is before us and trying to translate those colors as closely as we can. When surrounded by living color—the colors we observe when standing in nature—it is difficult to do otherwise. Plein air painters still modify colors as needed, but they primarily work from direct observation.

Monet famously described direct observation in this way: “Try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.”

We know that pigments and canvas cannot compete with the brilliance of actual sunlight—but we try. Such is the dance of living color.

IN THE STUDIO: “INFORMED MODIFICATION”

In the studio, our relationship to color changes—direct observation is no longer possible. We are once removed from the actual subject. If we are not face to face with living color then every color choice becomes a form of informed modification. We may still “borrow” from what we have seen by means of memory, studies, and reference photos, but the color strategy is now entirely our own.

Color grants us a wide latitude of expression. Whether we rely more on direct observation or informed modification, what matters is that the colors that end up in the final painting are believable in the context of that painting.

“Believable” color does not mean how accurately the colors match reality. It means that the viewer can accept the painter’s reality on their own terms.

In dramatic writing, there is something called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” A screenwriter can spin a fantastical tale of wizards with magical powers, but if we walk out of the theater saying, “That just wasn’t believable,” then the film would be considered a failure. The skilled writer knows how to weave a story in such a way that, for the brief time we spend in front of the movie screen, we accept it on its own terms.

The landscape painter’s goal is much the same. Whether spinning a tale of color as seemingly naturalistic as a Marc Hanson’s Eclipse Day (below) or as expressive as Mark Gould’s Glen, Canyon, Stream: Arcadian (here), it must be done in a way that is believable in the context of the painting. A painting is not reality, so its colors don’t necessarily have to conform to reality. But they do need to form an impression that is consistent with the internal color logic of the painting.