STEAM is always getting me excited, but today I had a delightful opportunity to begin learning plein air painting. Observational skills are something art and science always have in common, but guess what else I learned! In order to make an object appear further away, you essentially paint air! I was excited because I had just been talking to my 8th grader about gasses being matter even though they’re hard to observe. So, listen, air absorbs light, doesn’t it? Apparently it absorbs yellow and red wavelengths the most. Therefore, to make things appear further away (to “push them back”), artists make them cooler, grayer, and less detailed. They “de-saturate” the color by adding white. The artists who were teaching today talked about “sheer veils.” The further back you go, the more veils of air between the object and the viewer.
It seems like using some plein air paintings to observe the way a painter creates this illusion would be useful.
Like this painting by Laura Wheeler Waring Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France. circa 1925.
A classmate with me today suggested placing actual physical organza veils in front of an image to sort of compare what air is doing. Maybe take photos of distant vistas to see if we can see what the air is doing to our view.
