ArtistsNetwork.com 29SEEING SHADOW VARIETY
For painters, shadows are miraculous things, because a shadow in a painting
immediately suggests light. Shadows create light by way of contrast, and the
nature of a shadow can be found by close study of color and tone. Th ere are as
many permutations of shadows as there are conditions of light: cast shadows,
attached shadows in which a surface curves away from the light, soft-edged and
hard-edged shadows, double shadows (from multiple light sources), and so on.
When I’m painting outdoors on a sunny day, I often go for a subject in which
the shadows form a major part of the scene. If I paint contre-jour (facing the
sun or, translated literally, against the day), the shadows are thrown on the
ground toward me, as in Th e Stick Gate, Senegal and Shadows and Columns,
Venice, Italy (both opposite). I really enjoy this eff ect and make use of it to
defi ne the plane of the ground upon which the shadows are falling. It also gives
rise to halos of light around objects, which are lit from behind.
A completely diff erent but equally compelling eff ect of cast shadows is the
dappled shade cast by tree foliage. It may be that the shade falls on a building;
it’s a real challenge to create the impression of sun fi ltered through leaves, while
allowing the architectural features to hold their own against the scattered pat-
tern. Th is can be seen in Number One, Th e Royal Crescent, London, England (page
27), in which the complications of a steep architectural perspective, refl ected
light and the chaos of cast shadows all conspired to trip me up. Making some
The sun fi ltering through the branches of
the trees throws a striking diagonal pattern
of dappled shade onto the church wall
and bell tower in Plane Tree Shadows,
Crete, Greece (watercolor on paper, 15x11).
I placed the doors and round windows
lightly fi rst and then added the shadows,
varying the shadow color as I went along
to pick up the subtle changes in hue within
the dark tone.order out of this kind of visual confu-
sion, however, is a challenge that
I relish. To stand back after an hour
or two of work and see that the pic-
ture is beginning to make sense is
very gratifying.
Plane Tree Shadows, Crete, Greece (at
left) is a much more straightforward
composition. Th e building is painted
straight-on; there were no perspective
worries, and I was able to concentrate
on the shadow patterns on the wall
and the color variations within them.
Where the same shadow pattern falls
on the ground, the scheme changes
from a pattern that slants diagonally
to a more horizontal pattern of light.SUNLIGHT &
SHADOW PATTERNS
It’s impossible to separate patterns
of sunlight from shadows, of course.
Th e clear, crisp shadows of the fi gures
in Walking in Sunlight, Venice, Italy
(page 30) would be nonexistent with-
out the sunlit areas of the ground.
I left the paper entirely white for the
path and painted the shadows of the
two fi gures as a single, rather compli-
cated shape. Had the day been
overcast, these would have been at
most soft-edged, darker smudges
within a dark ground, if visible at all.
But here we have bright sun casting
almost photographic projections of
the fi gures onto the horizontal plane
on which they walk.
Whether the edges of a cast shadow
appear sharp or blurred depends not
only on the lighting conditions but
also on the distance between the
object that’s casting the shadow and
the surface on which it’s cast. You’ll
often see soft and sharp shadows
within the same scene, where some
shadows are cast onto a surface
nearby and others are cast from
farther away. Typically, the dappled